The $50 phone is coming.

I’m not talking about a phone that costs $50 to make (that retails for $250). I’m talking a phone that costs $50 or less to make at retali. Americans already get free phones, subsidized by one-year or two-year service contracts, they they may not get the implications here.

Readers of this blog know about the big growth in service to Latin America, Asia and Africa. What you may not know is that this is mainly a middle-class phenomenon, even there. Poor people, poor by the standards of those countries, either use middlemen for their limited phone service, or they do without.

• With a $50 phone, service providers may be able to afford cell towers across the countryside, even in the poorest villages. Families in those villages may be able to afford their own phones. People from those villages may be able to have those phones, and access that service, when they are out in their fields, or in open country. Universal service may really be at hand.

• Another implication of the sub-$50 phone is that a new mass market of voice-only customers will develop. For now data service relies on more expensive models. Eventually Moore’s Law will allow today’s data services to trickle down onto those $50 handsets, but that will take time. And at that point, the selling point for things like text messaging will be its lower cost. (In contrast, today’s text messaging is seen as an extra-cost add-on to your service.)

• A third implication of the sub-$50 phone will be its increased use by criminals. A disposable phone means more disposable accounts, more pre-paid services that allow anonymity. It means more phones that can be used as triggers for car bombs by terrorists, or that can’t be traced to kidnappers and bank robbers.

Conclusion?

Universal, pre-paid, anonymous service will come in the voice market before it reaches the data market. The cellphone will become the testbed for what this means, for economies, for world politics, and for society. And that test starts now.