The Donahue Report (via Multichannel News) notes that Comcast filed the trademark for the term "True Gig" on October 20, suggesting that a 1 Gbps offering from the company is likely in the works. Earlier this year company stated they'd offer 1 Gbps and higher services "as soon as possible" as the company looks to quickly deploy the DOCSIS 3.1 standard once it's complete. Comcast's current top offering is a 505 Mbps down, 100 Mbps up fiber/coaxial hybrid tier that runs users around $300 a month, comes with a $1,000 ETF, a $250 activation fee, and a $250 installation fee.

As noted recently, some politicians in Hungary thought it would be a good idea to not just tax the Internet -- but to tax the volume of traffic sent over the Internet specifically. According to the proposal, the upcoming proposal would set forth a tax of 150 forints (60 US cents) per gigabyte of data traffic, and while ISPs could get tax deductions to lessen the load, the obvious resulting price hikes would get passed on to the consumer. Said consumers took to protesting the proposal over the weekend. "This would be a double tax on us, as I have already paid a sky-high VAT when I bought the gadgets, computer and router," notes one rally attendee.

Amazon's earnings last week confirmed what most analysts have been guessing for several months: Amazon's smartphone is a dud. A combination of uninteresting gimmicks and AT&T exclusivity hindered the phone out of the gate, and while Amazon isn't sharing the number of units sold, the company did say they took a $170 million charge on inventory commitments last quarter because of the device and is sitting on another $83 million in unsold phones.

Verizon Wireless has started taking heat from privacy advocates for altering their customers' traffic and inserting unique identifiers that users have no control over. We've already explored how over the last two years Verizon has been ramping up data collection on its wireless customers via programs like Verizon Selects and their Relevant Mobile Ad department, which track your personal information and web habits for more tailored advertisements (that data's also sold to third parties).

For years there has been a concerted push by the broadband industry to try and insist that the United States broadband market is secretly flawless, awesome and highly competitive, despite the fact that absolutely every independent source of broadband data (from Akamai and the FCC to the OECD and OOkla's Net Index) suggests we're absolutely and utterly mediocre at every metric that counts.

That's not to say we're not improving in some very select regions (thanks to things like Google Fiber, Verizon FiOS and DOCSIS 3.0), but overall we're quite indisputably, utterly average when it comes to broadband worldwide -- especially on price.

FCC boss Tom Wheeler has been talking a lot lately about raising the standard definition of broadband to at least 10 Mbps (for government-subsidized rural options) and 25 Mbps for everybody else. He's also been talking about how when you look at speeds of 25 Mbps higher there's little to no competition -- as most DSL providers struggle to offer that speed in any volume.

While Netflix and Verizon have sparred over poor (but now improved) streaming performance to the point of threatening lawsuits, that disagreement only appears to go so far. In a research note BTIG Research (registration required) indicates that Verizon is now offering new FiOS customers a $150 VISA prepaid gift card and a free year of Netflix service if they sign up for the FiOS triple play. It's an interesting move given the animosity many larger cable operators have had toward something they see as a competitor (while Netflix insists they're just a supplement to traditional cable and a competitor to services like HBO).
Update: Verizon reached out to me to note that this is a trial offer currently only being made available in the New York City market, and is only running from 10/22-11/1.

Viacom has taken their retransmission fight with Suddenlink to a new, decidedly more mutated, level. According to the Charleston Gazette, Viacom has taken to using actors dressed up as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to shame Suddenlink at public events after the two sides couldn't come to terms on retransmission fees.

Please carefully deposit your most interesting thoughts into the receptacle provided below.

As noted recently, the most interesting thing about Apple's latest round of announcements was probably the AppleSIM, which allows users to use their new iPad Air 2 or iPad Mini 3 on different services without swapping out the SIM card. As also noted that's an idea that likely terrifies the biggest carriers, as keeping people's devices locked down goes a long way toward keeping real competition at bay.

Last year, Frontier Communications CEO Maggie Wilderotter stated that people don't really need 1 Gbps, and that the 3 to 6 Mbps most of her customers can get was just fine for most people. Last summer, trying to downplay the fact said 3-6 Mbps is painfully uncompetitive, Wilderotter called Google Fiber "hype" that "confuses customers," and that even talking about 1 Gbps services was something that was "disrespectful" to the customer base.

Speaking on Comcast's earnings conference call this week, Comcast NBCUniversal CEO Stephen Burke stated that he was "surprised" by HBO and CBS recently announcing they would provide what customers wanted and make it easier to acquire their content online. HBO's announcement for a 2015 streaming service came after years of consumer clamoring for a service that didn't require a traditional cable TV subscription.

Some AT&T U-Verse users in our forums say that an emergency alert warning appears to have hijacked their cable boxes, preventing them from changing the channel. Users say the alert switches them to a local channel to receive the alert, but the alert doesn't appear to deliver any information of note.

Broadcasters got their wished-for death blow to Aereo this week as NY Judge Alison Nathan approved an injunction and denied the company's request to be licensed as a cable company. The Supreme Court's shutdown of Aereo effectively declared Aereo a cable company -- provided as it was willing to pay retransmission fees like a cable company.

Comcast this week stated that the cable giant has deployed around 5 million of the company's shiny new "X1" set top boxes after beginning the deployment two years ago. Comcast says they're on target to have X1's in the majority of homes within the next three years, though that doesn't include potentially-acquired Time Warner Cable customers who are getting new set tops of their own. Comcast's 5 million deployed X1's are only a fraction of the company's 22.3 million video subscribers, however. Comcast states that those customers on X1 are 20% less likely to leave the company.

• Need for Speed on Internet Emerges as Comcast Deal Test [bloomberg.com]
• Where you should live if you want America’s fastest Internet service? Delaware… approximately [bgr.com]
• Endless craving for Internet control [washingtontimes.com]
• Comcast shedding cable subscribers -- but broadband growth more than compensates [oregonlive.com]
• Here’s The Latest Bit Of Astroturfing From The Cable Industry About Broadband Speeds [consumerist.com]
• Judge says Aereo must shut for good as live TV, but service may survive as a cloud DVR [gigaom.com]
• Time Warner Cable's Advertised $89.99 Triple Play: Now $190.77. What the F@$#X$!? [huffingtonpost.com]
• T-Mobile: Our network has trouble with building walls and long distances [arstechnica.com]
• FCC suspends review of Comcast/TWC and AT&T/DirecTV mergers [arstechnica.com]
• In wake of Anonabox, more crowdsourced Tor router projects make their pitch [arstechnica.com]

Critics of Comcast's proposed $45 billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable have heated up their assault on the merger, with more than thirty economics and antitrust law experts this week warning the FCC that the proposed merger would hurt competition and be a detriment to consumer welfare. According to the sixteen-page letter, the Comcast merger would give the cable giant control of 40% of the broadband market, and the leverage necessary to wage an aggressive anti-competitive war on both large and small competitors alike.

In a new blog post, the FCC's Gigi Sohn notes that the agency has so far received 3.9 million comments on the agency's net neutrality proceedings to date, filed both through the FCC's Electronic Comment Filing System (ECFS) and the agency's dedicated openinternet@fcc.gov email address. If you're in the mood for some light reading this weekend, Sohn notes that the agency has ow released some 2,444,672 of those comments in one zipped XML file. "As before, we encourage those with the requisite technical skills to analyze the raw data and build visualizations or other tools and to share them with the public," states Sohn.

While T-Mobile's industry disruption has resulted in some pricing shifts by AT&T and Verizon, most of these changes by bigger players have been cosmetic in nature, focusing on upselling heavy users by reducing prices for bigger data allotments (usually customers on 10 GB plans or above). Today Sprint bucked that trend slightly by announcing some changes to one of their lower-end plans: upping the 600 MB allotment on their $20 Family Share plan to 1 GB. "That’s double the data offered by Verizon and more than 3 times the data offered by AT&T at the same price point," Sprint crows in their release.

Over the last few years, arguably the biggest factor for rising cable bills can be attributed to the price of sports programming. DirecTV is spending close to $1.5 billion annually to offer the NFL Sunday Ticket.

Bill Neilson , Karl Bode