While Comcast lobbyists tried their best to slow the encroachment of Verizon FiOS into their hometown of Philadelphia, the Philly city council authorized a citywide franchise back in February (you can read the agreement here (pdf) if you're into that kind of thing). As per the deal, Verizon has around seven years to wire the whole city, though these agreements (as with NYC and DC) often have loopholes that let Verizon extend deadlines or wiggle out of obligations should certain adoption numbers not be met. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, service this week went live in Chestnut Hill, South Philadelphia and North Philadelphia, near Girard College. Additional neighborhoods should come online this year, but Verizon isn't saying which ones. Verizon does keep a PA construction notice (pdf) on their website, but it's quite often outdated.

There's been a flurry of rumors lately surrounding T-Mobile owner Deutsche Telekom, and their desire to improve T-Mobile's fourth-place fortunes in the U.S. wireless market.

Apparently taking a page out of this month's advertising debate between AT&T and Verizon, Canadian carrier Telus has sued Rogers Communications for ads claiming that the Rogers wireless network is "the fastest and most reliable in the country." Telus and Bell Canada have of course just launched their new, $1 billion HSPA network, which offers speeds up to 21 Mbps to Canadian customers. As such, Telus demanded earlier this month that Rogers stop making advertising claims that they held the 3G speed edge -- a request Rogers ignored, since they too offer 21 Mbps HSPA+ service. "Telus has not submitted any data on their network performance and we look forward to vigorously defending our position in court," says Rogers.

AOL continues an interesting trip that took them from one of the largest and most powerful ISPs on the Internet, to a fractured and financially-troubled company with dreams of becoming an advertising giant. Of course most of their problems were caused by their inability to adapt to (or really in some cases even recognize) the broadband market -- something that was at least in part caused by former executive Lisa Hook, who went on to do amazing things with VoIP carrier SunRocket as well. With its spin off from Time Warner, the company this fall has undergone its latest in an endless line of evolution efforts, but has announced those changes will come with pink slips for about one third of AOL's employees, or about 2,300 workers.

For years the rumor has floated out there that either Verizon or AT&T would buy DirecTV in order to have direct control of the company's satellite TV operations. Sometimes these rumors are based in conjecture, but more often than not they're based on nothing whatsoever. With DirecTV prepared to get a new CEO (their last CEO just departed to be Rupert Murdoch's right-hand man at News Corp.), the rumors are apparently bubbling up once again. According to Reuters, representatives from both AT&T and Verizon have approached Liberty Media over the last few years about a sale, and the outlet cites sources who believe new CEO Michael White is little more than a "babysitter" until this endlessly-rumored deal can be accomplished.

If you recall, back in May of 2008 we told you how the Comcast web portal was hacked by a group calling itself "Kryogenics," posting the usually gramatically incoherent shout out to their own supposed awesomeness and fellow nerd homies. The hack disrupted user access to the portal and the official Comcast forums for several hours, before Comcast tracked down the problem and the fix was propagated across DNS servers. According to the Philadelphia Business Journal, the three young men responsible for the hack have been indicted for "conspiring to disrupt service." The indictment claims the hack cost Comcast "a little less than $129,000," though each defendant could receive a maximum sentence of five years in jail, three years of supervised release, a $250,000 fine and a $100 special assessment, on top of potential forced restitution to Comcast -- who certainly could use the money.

Manassas, Virginia was the first US city to see a real, non-trial launch of broadband over powerline (BPL) technology. However, BPL has floundered the last few years because of its inherent potential for interference with amateur and emergency radio, its irrelevance in the face of next-generation speeds, and the unavoidable fact that many utilities simply didn't want to be broadband providers.

Yesterday we issued a report exploring how Verizon was again hinting at how they believed metered billing is inevitable. We also discussed how yet again, you had an ISP suggesting that a shift to metered billing was financially necessary (not true) and that the ISP desire to shift to metered billing was dictated by some kind of altruism (also not true). Apparently, this position upset Todd Spangler over at Multichannel News, who somewhere in between taking pot shots at "edgy bloggers" and "clueless" flat-rate pricing proponents arrives at his central thesis: that consumption-based billing is inevitable: story continues..

After his company won approval of its bankruptcy plan this week, Charter Communications CEO Neil Smit tells Bloomberg that upon exiting from bankruptcy, the company will raise prices and consider consumption-based billing. Charter Communications hasn't been profitable since the company went public in 1999, posted a $2.45 billion loss last year, constantly ranks at the bottom of most customer satisfaction surveys, is swimming in debt, and was just forced into bankruptcy and reorganization.

The FCC has long been an agency that has played fast and loose when it comes to using science and data to fuel its policy decisions. The agency for most of broadband's life cycle has been using outdated data, or inadequate data provided by industry lobbyists designed to make things look pretty and keep government out of their hair. With a new FCC and new boss Julius Genachowski, the agency has promised to be data driven. Yet Bruce Kushnick over at Harvard's Neiman Watchdog claims that in policy discussions, the agency's still using inadequate or old data -- sometimes more than a decade old -- to shape broadband and wireless policy.

After spending the last week or so taking pot shots at each other, AT&T and Verizon met in court yesterday to do legal battle over Verizon's latest wireless ads, which criticize AT&T's 3G network coverage and performance. AT&T had complained to the courts that the 3G coverage maps (clearly labeled as such) in the ads could confuse customers into thinking customers didn't get voice and EDGE coverage in non-3G markets. The Judge overseeing the case has not surprisingly denied AT&T's request to have the ads pulled, but has set a December 16 date to hear further arguments in the case.

Of course by the time this is settled, the "damage" to AT&T will already have been done -- made worse in this case by all the extra attention AT&T's suit brought to Verizon's ads, and in turn AT&T's network coverage. To try and make up some ground, AT&T has launched a new series of ads featuring Luke Wilson, proclaiming rather vaguely that AT&T offers "the best 3G experience." Surely there's some AT&T customers who'd like to take AT&T to task on that claim after the last year's worth of iPhone connectivity issues, belated MMS functionality and other problems?

At this point, AT&T's probably better off just giving those advertising and legal fees to their network engineers, who are in the field busily trying to upgrade the network and migrating markets to 850MHz.

While consumers love that Verizon invested $23 billion on fiber to the home instead of nursing copper for the next decade, that investment has come at a cost for the company's DSL and landline customers. Rural Verizon DSL customers find themselves unwanted and sold off, while others say Verizon neglects copper infrastructure upkeep and repairs in order to spend time on more profitable customers.

Telecompetitor directs our attention to a study by ABI Research that indicates that femtocell shipments this year have been well, less than impressive. The technology, which creates essentially a micro-cell tower in the home, helps with coverage issues by allowing users to make calls over their home broadband connection.

Back in September we noted how it seems like only a matter of time before Verizon engaged in metered broadband billing. After Time Warner Cable's PR implosion, most ISPs are in a holding pattern on the idea until they can sell consumers on it, something they haven't done a good job of so far.

Given the high costs of deploying fiber to the home, we're starting to see new models emerge whereby if customers really want it, they can share the cost of having it installed (one Norwegian ISP gives a $400 rebate if you dig your own fiber trench). Now Utopia, the nation's largest municipal fiber deployment, is testing a new model whereby communities who want the fiber deployed can share the cost of installation. As more Utah cities look to connect to Utopia but debate how they should pay for it, Brigham City has decided that if users want fiber they can pay for it themselves. 1,600 local residents have already ponied up $3,000 a piece, helping the city install a $5.5 million network while the city itself only puts up about $700,000 of the required cost.

For many years now companies (including some of the biggest broadband ISPs) have been issuing gift cards instead of cash as rebates. Why? Companies can impose a number of restrictions on the cards that statistically reduce the amount of actual cash companies have to pay out.

Consumer advocates, unions and state regulators are worried that Verizon's plan to sell a massive chunk of their DSL and landline networks to Frontier Communications won't go very well. The $8.5 billion deal, if approved, would infuse Frontier with 4.8 million new residential and small-business phone lines across 14 states, 1 million broadband connections, and 11,000 former Verizon employees.

With the cable company he founded currently struggling through bankruptcy, Charter Communications founder and Chairman now finds himself facing a much more serious and difficult task: beating back cancer a second time. Allen, who already fought and beat cancer some twenty five years ago, is now facing non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, according to The Seattle Times. "For those who know Paul's story, you know he beat Hodgkin's a little more than 25 years ago and he is optimistic he can beat this, too," says Allen's sister Jody Allen. Allen spent much of the summer battling with creditors, who didn't like Allen's efforts to retain control of the company after restructuring. The restructuring is supposed to eliminate about $8 billion of the company's $21.7 billion in debt.

Verizon suffered from quite a bloody third quarter when it came to DSL numbers, the company losing 135,000 DSL customers -- and only a portion of those having upgraded to the company's FiOS service. To help counter these DSL losses Verizon keeps tinkering with their DSL promotions, and yesterday rolled out a new one. According to a Verizon press release, new Verizon 1 Mbps, 3 Mbps or 7 Mbps DSL customers can get service free for six months if they're willing to sign a one year contract with the company. FiOS customers should note the company has also slightly tweaked their FiOS promotions depending on where you live.

Like the AOL of old, Vonage has cultivated quite a reputation as a company that often makes it incredibly difficult to actually cancel your service. The check for this behavior has finally come due, and it's likely considerably less than they made from the practice. According to an announcement posted to the website of Idaho Attorney General Lawrence Wasden, Vonage has agreed to pay $3 million in penalties to 32 states in order to settle an investigation into some of its business practices. The settlement also cites Vonage for failing to note their VoIP service needed broadband and then socking customers with cancellation fees, and for offers of "free" services that wound up charging a litany of activation and other fees.