• What’s really behind the Comcast 250 GB bandwidth cap [muniwireless.com]
• Fiber-optic Britain could cost £30bn [techradar.com]
• Will Incumbents Stifle Innovation? [gigaom.com]
• Fiber-Focused Broadband Plan Drives SureWest Growth [xchangemag.com]
• WiMax Far Ahead of LTE at Japan's NEC [pcworld.com]
• FCC Mulls Pulling Plug on Wilmington DTV Trial [multichannel.com]
• Online TV Viewing Approaches the Mainstream [Yahoo News]
• Mozilla confirms browser instability, blames Symantec for incompatibility woes [theinquirer.net]

Despite its history of legal problems and changes that the company has gone through to adapt to the digital music market, Napster has managed to hang in there at the #2 or #3 spot for its industry for the last five years. A recent move towards developing its mobile music market has been successful for the company so far as have DRM-free web-based sales of music. However, investors aren’t happy with the business and competition is increasing in the industry so Napster is facing problems both internally and externally that leave the company ripe for a takeover. CEO Chris Gorog says that an unlimited all-you-can eat subscription service remains the music download service of the future but failure to convince both the buying public and the company’s investors of this has led the company to hire an investment bank to field offers by those interested in buying out Napster.

There was one section of spectrum that failed to sell earlier this year during the big 700 MHz spectrum auction held by the FCC. The D-Block, often dubbed the public safety portion of the spectrum, was being auctioned under the condition that the buyer must build out an interoperable emergency communications network as part of the deal.

Back in 2006, a court determined that Echostar was violating TiVo’s patents for certain DVR technology. The company was ordered to pay out damages but Echostar is still appealing the matter. TiVo recently asked the court to find Echostar in contempt for continuing to use the patent-infringing technology and also requested the court to order Echostar to pay $220 million in damages that have been incurred since the jury verdict has been on appeal. The judge took the matter under consideration and said that he hopes to have a decision by October 1st but may not have one until sometime much later this year.

People who are afraid that they might get caught and fined for their BitTorrent use may find themselves getting sucked into a recent email scam which preys on this fear. Emails are being sent out claiming to come from anti-piracy group MediaDefender which inform the recipient that their illegal filesharing is being tracked. The person is supposed to open up an attachment for information about the violations which, of course, ends up actually being a virus. These emails are apparently being randomly sent out; their success points to the frequency of BitTorrent use and the widespread fear of being caught for illegal downloads.

A satellite that successfully launched yesterday is designed to send high-resolution color satellite imagery back to Earth for the benefit of the U.S. Government as well as for Google.

Microsoft is working on building a network system that will make accessing Wi-Fi in vehicles much easier and more reliable. Dubbed Vi-Fi, the system relies on a software code that sits over the 802.11 interface to coordinate a cluster of base stations.

NBC did a variety of different things to handle the high demand for Olympics video content that was streamed on their website. One of those things was to have users download Microsoft’s web browser plugin Silverlight in order to be able to view content. Now that NBC is beginning to offer some NFL video content, they’ve decided to ditch Silverlight and return to the use of Adobe Flash. The cited reason is that approximately 98% of Internet-connected computers already have Adobe Flash installed but reports indicate that the switch caused problems for broadband viewers who experienced buffering issues, fuzzy viewing and frozen frames when trying to watch the game online.

It’s been five years since the big Enron broadband scandal in which criminal charges were filed against a number of executives for misrepresentation of how advanced the network was and inflated sales of stock related to that misrepresentation. In 2005, several of the executives involved got acquittals or faced hung juries.

When it was announced that the Google Android platform would launch with the HTC Dream on T-Mobile’s network, many eyebrows were raised at the choice to go with a carrier that has such a small 3G footprint. However, T-mobile has been working quietly on developing that network and has now announced the release of their first HSDPA handset, the Sony Ericsson TM506. This phone is the first of T-mobile’s phones to allow third-party Java applications to access the Internet which speed tests have shown is being done at speeds exceeding 700 kbps. Incidentally one report (with somewhat fuzzy results) has said that the U.S. is now caught up to Western Europe in the adoption of 3G.

Two women who were facing court charges in Denmark for illegal filesharing have successfully used the defense that their Wi-Fi had been piggybacked by unknown users and that they therefore are not responsible for any illegal p2p sharing that occurred on their connections. Both women admitted that they had p2p software on their computers but insisted that they weren’t the ones doing the filesharing.

Video site Joost launched successfully but then had to severely scale back plans for growth due in part to the fact that the service’s bandwidth consumption caused problems for many people during beta testing. The company had been quiet for a little while but has now made the big announcement that they are switching away from their software-based model and towards a new web-based video-viewing experience similar to that offered by Hulu.

Kevin Martin could be leaving his position as head of the FCC within a couple of months depending upon the outcome of the presidential election. If Obama wins, Martin is expected to almost immediately give his position over to one of the FCC’s democrats.

• US startup launches online airwaves market [theregister.co.uk]
• Was EarthLink's failed citywide Wi-Fi a blessing in disguise? [News.com]
• Consumers dig mobile broadband: 3G device ownership up 80% [arstechnica.com]
• Telefonica to provide broadband access via fiber despite open network protests [lightwave.com]
• VoIP Enhancements Coming to iPhone [wi-fiplanet.com]
• Retrials of 3 ex-Enron broadband execs postponed [chron.com]
• Joost To Kill Desktop Client [gigaom.com]
• Sophos DNS snafu creates update problems [theregister.co.uk]

It's Friday, so turn off your iPhone, put up your feet, and vent your geek angst into the comment section below.

Think your $3,000-$5,000 international data roaming iPhone bill was bad? One Portland family wasn't particularly happy to get a $20,000 bill from AT&T (via Consumerist). The Terry family sent their son on a Canadian adventure, where he used a laptop with an AirCard to send photos and e-mails back home -- without paying attention to additional per kilobyte charges (which can be up to $.0195/KB).

We've always known that Comcast has long had an invisible usage limit, because our users have been complaining about it for the better part of a decade. While Comcast says they're now simply clarifying this previously existing cap (by capping users at 250GB starting October 1) a Florida court case would seem to suggest otherwise.

For years, Qwest has sent lawyers after communities who, unhappy with Qwest service, wanted to deploy their own broadband. The baby bell has been particularly aggressive in the state of Utah, where the telco sued the Utopia FTTH project in an effort to prevent them from using regional utility poles.

The other day, Dell CEO Michael Dell predicted that wireless carriers would start subsidizing sub-$500 netbooks in an effort to sell more 3G wireless broadband connections. What he didn't mention is that Dell's new Inspiron Mini 9 comes ready for that future, with an integrated 3G card that wasn't mentioned in the initial release. Apparently, the feature wasn't announced because Dell hasn't sealed the deal with wireless provider partners yet, though an announcement should arrive in weeks. PC Mag suggests that given Dell's previous relationship with AT&T, it's likely the chip will support HSDPA, not EVDO -- though we'll find out for sure in a couple of weeks.

Forget dopes who leave your social security numbers on a company laptop at a bar, or phishing scams: University of Colorado law professor Paul Ohm believes the modern ISP, thanks to new technological developments like deep packet inspection, poses the greatest privacy threat to American consumers. Sure, NabuAD may have been beaten back this week, but Ohm believes the desire to make a revenue stream out of tracking absolutely everything you do online will be too great for ISPs to resist.