I don't believe that aircraft voice communications will ever completely go away this will help supplement congestion on voice frequencies. I do agree that it is slowly going that way for example I know of one airline that has a VHF Frequency in the new york area to communicate with dispatch but a majority of the time the pilots use satcom to get in touch with maintenance control or the company dispatchers.
After doing some more research sounds like this is going to supplement DATACOMM and ACARS.
" AeroMACS will be supporting the FAA’s new DataComm program by allowing the offloading of large amounts of aircraft data from the VHF datalinks.14 This offloading will reduce safety traffic congestion on the legacy aviation VHF datalink networks, and thereby ensure critical Air Traffic Control (ATC) messages are not unnecessarily delayed between the FAA controllers and aircraft. More specifically, the highest concentration of sources, users, and stakeholders of information required for safe and regular flight operations occurs at the nation’s airports.15 Within the national airspace system, the airport is where aircraft are in closest proximity to each other and to a wide variety of service and operational support vehicles, personnel, infrastructure and service applications (such as air traffic controllers, aircraft pilots, airline operators, ramp operators, aircraft service providers, and emergency service, snow removal and deicing personnel, all of which contribute to safety and regularity of flight).16 Communications needs among these various elements of the air traffic system are growing rapidly and have outstripped the limited capacity for current safety spectrum. To accommodate increased aircraft and airport traffic without sacrificing safety requirements, the development of a next generation surface communications system was needed with the capacity to handle the current and future operational requirements as discussed above. "
www.nasa.gov
