I never said SSL was exclusive to 443. I also never said you couldn’t run any security on any port you want to…you did that:
So if you block port 443 you’re blocking ALL secure communication.
Sound familiar?. 
I know of no other clients that, by default, use 443 for secure communications. Care to share a couple with me? I’m looking for default ports here - not the ones you can reconfigure to use whatever port you want.
Having said that, if you DO disable (or block) 443 completely, then you will, in effect, be denying all of your customers access to the vast, vast majority of merchant websites where they may wish to purchase any item. Currently, the only sites that don’t use 443 for SSL (more correctly, SSL over TLS) are businesses who have re-configured their web services for their employees, such as access to remote e-mail. Which is a tangent to the thread, anyway.
Keith, I hope you get a service that works for you. They’re engineering new communication and compression algorithms all the time, to increase throughput and reliability. That should help some. Your typical cell phone call uses 4k (that’s it!) of bandwidth when you chat with someone. The digitization and compression algorithms that turn your voice into a data packet are built right into the phone. Since they’re also built onto a chip and hard coded in many phones, using an old phone can lead to less than acceptable performance over newer systems.
Since all your communication from the phone is data, it can be routed through the network in any way they see fit. Voice comm is always given priority (since it’s the only one where a human can “see” the difference), but regular data packets can also be sent over the same connection. This is how things are headed, so you can expect (eventually) to see nothing but wireless towers everywhere, with your voice and data to your provider being sent wirelessly.
The only thing that worries me about the wireless future is during emergencies. It’s far easier for a telecom company to power (on generators) a single point (the “central office”, or CO) which sends you dial tone, than it is to power every tower they have. Most of those towers don’t have direct connection to any backup power. Granted, that’s changing some, too. 9/11 and Katrina changed some of the legislature so that wireless providers are required to provide service during emergencies, but the scope is limited as to how long that power must be maintained. Long after Katrina, during power outages, only my hard-line phone actually worked. Our cells couldn’t find a tower, even though I had backup power and could keep them charged.