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Canada is dropping landlines in favor of mobile VoIP and cellular service.

The newly appointed Canadian public works and government services minister, Diane Finley, will oversee a transition from landlines to cell and VoIP phones as part of a push to modernize and save money at the same time, according to the Hill Times.

The move should save the government a fair amount of money, as it is currently estimated that the Canadian federal government spends about $31 Canadian per person per month on landlines. This contracts with the $15 per month that VoIP is expected to cost the government.

This is but one of the recent indicators that shows adoption of mobile VoIP.

The mobile VoIP market is expected to be worth $32.2 billion by 2013, as we have reported in the past, and by 2019 it is expected that half of all mobile calls will be made over all-IP networks.

This growth in VoIP usage is not confined to landlines, either; consumers and businesses alike are also using VoIP on their mobile phones.

The market for voice-over-LTE (News - Alert) (VoLTE), which is basically using VoIP for voice calls over the 4G cellular data network, is predicted to grow to 8 million subscribers by end the of the year, as we reported last month.

The number of VoLTE subscribers is expected to increase at 145 percent compound annual growth between 2012 and 2017, according to Infonetics (News - Alert) research.

Mobile VoIP makes a lot of sense partially because it costs less than current calling rates, as Canada is discovering.

This savings is particularly noteworthy for users who frequently call other countries since all calls become local when callers use the same VoIP service (think Skype (News - Alert) to Skype, for instance). Even when VoIP connects with non-VoIP phones, the rates are still much less on average.

Other benefits of mobile VoIP include simplicity, too. While mobile VoIP can sound like a move toward added complexity, that’s not the case at all when all calling is routed through a VoIP solution. Instead of an employee having to manage multiple phones—an office phone, a landline, one or more cellular phones, VoIP enables the opportunity to have all calling going through a single system. This calling can then route to any handset, whether a mobile or the desk phone at the office.

Mobile VoIP delivers the benefit of added features, too. Cellular phones do not currently leverage unified communications, but this is much more possible with a VoIP solution. Unified communications can bring video, chat and file sharing to the phone experience in a way that other calling options cannot.