Insert your tryptophan-addled thoughts into our comment section below.

• Mexico's MVS Plans Broadband Deal With Clearwire [advfn.com]
• Creating demand 'crucial to driving broadband' [computeach.co.uk]
• Pub fined £8,000 for customer's illicit downloads [guardian.co.uk]
• Next-gen, turf wars and rage over the UK Digital Economy Bill [theinquirer.net]
• Rogers Raises Stakes In Cogeco Cable, Cogeco Inc. [multichannel.com]
• India plans its own net snoop system [theregister.co.uk]
• Console gaming on its last legs - The future is all about the network [crunchgear.com]

An FCC public notice (pdf) indicates that the agency is looking for a few good men, women or companies -- to act as database managers for the agency's white space broadband efforts. White space broadband allows for the unlicensed creation of inexpensive wireless broadband service by using the spectrum partially freed from the migration to digital television.

UK Cable provider Virgin Media says they're experimenting with a new deep packet inspection solution that will snoop into customer packets to determine if they're trading copyrighted files. The trial will cover 40% of the company's customers, though no action will be taken against users (nor will they be informed of the snooping). The CView technology being used is the same gear used by behavioral advertising firm Phorm. With much P2P traffic being encrypted and such gear still not able to detect all P2P details, this could be a wild goose chase -- but it appears the ISP wants to get out ahead of the UK government's effort to turn ISPs into Internet content babysitters.

Fairpoint Communications is currently in bankruptcy after a year of offering sub-par service to customers, missing deployment deadlines, being delisted by the NYSE, and angering regulators, customers, unions and investors. They haven't had enough money to pay what they owe small business customers, but they have had enough money to still engage in anti-competitive lobbying.

According to Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg, the telco isn't worried about the threat Hulu poses to their freshly created TV empire, because Hulu will probably be dead in a year or two from now. "This is in for the next eight to twelve months and in two years it won't matter because the world will have moved on," the CEO was recently quoted as saying. He might not be wrong -- Hulu very well could be headed for also-ran status once Comcast acquires NBC Universal, and does its best to ensure that Hulu doesn't rock the TV revenue boat or bump up against the cable industry's TV Everywhere initiative. That said, "cable guys" tend to have a degree of hubris in thinking that Internet video will never really harm them, despite the fact that when/if Hulu dies, there will be a stream of competitors (including piracy) waiting in the wings.

Earlier this month Mediacom hinted that their implementation of faster DOCSIS 3.0 technology would involve both 50 Mbps and 100 Mbps tiers, and would be arriving sometime in December. According to the Waterloo Cedar Falls Courier, Waterloo will be a "showcase" for their faster speeds, which will launch before the end of December. While the speeds are set at 50/5 Mbps and 105/10 Mbps, the company says they're still trying to determine what they'll charge for the "high end" product. Mediacom hopes to have about 25% of their network upgraded to the faster speeds by the end of the year, and has an additional 25% of their network DOCSIS 3.0 headend-capable for expanded launches in 2010.

• Broadband tax 'could triple for homes with multiple lines' [netimperative.com]
• UK provider 3 halts sales of mobile broadband in poorly connected areas [mobiletoday.co.uk]
• General Election will decide Britain's broadband future [pcpro.co.uk]
• Profitable 'Pay Us Or We'll Sue You For File Sharing' Scheme About To Send 30,000 More Letters [techdirt.com]
• Mobile Phone Bills Rated As Lowest Priority for UK Consumers [cellular-news.com]
• Dutch court guts Mininova [theinquirer.net]
• Virgin Media to trial filesharing monitoring system [theregister.co.uk]

Enjoy your holiday, and empty your head into the comment section below.

• FCC Solicits Applications for White Space Database Administrators [gigaom.com]
• Ruckus Wireless intros wireless broadband alternative to 3G [thestandard.com]
• LTE Vendor Showdown: Nokia Siemens, Huawei Battle it Out [xchangemag.com]
• Palm & Sprint on the hunt for users' missing webOS backups [fiercewireless.com]
• Rumor: MiFi coming to Bell Canada on November 30 for $99.95 on contract [gadgetell.com]
• Time Warner Cable Asks Customers: Should It Roll Over Or Get Tough On Programmer Price Hikes [multichannel.com]
• Kindle gets PDF reader, 85% more battery life [theinquirer.net]
• NY Emergency Management Office to use Xbox 360 as test bed for console-transmitted emergency warnings [reghardware.co.uk]

According to the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Comcast has settled a nearly four year customer class action lawsuit. The suit alleged that Comcast, even as far back as when it was AT&T Broadband, overcharged franchise fees -- in some instances for periods of time when customers weren't even active subscribers. The amusing part is that even though the amounts were fairly small to begin with, subscribers won't see a dime. However, the lawyers for the class action suit get a tidy payday of $462,962.50, nine times the actual settlement. On the plus side, Comcast has agreed to donate $50,000 to one or more local charities.

Users in our Rogers forum note that the Canadian cable provider will be beta launching an open beta of their On Demand Online service beginning November 30. The service, which is Rogers' version of "TV Everywhere," promises to offer users streaming access to several dozen channels of Internet video content, provided you already have Rogers TV service. According to users, the service will come with high quality (500kbps) or higher def (1Mbps) streaming options, all of which will eat away at your Rogers usage cap, incurring overage penalties. In house ad-driven content fueled by high per-GB overages is essentially most cable operators' dream business model -- though we'll see how well Rogers' product fares in the open market when it launches next year.

ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) on Tuesday condemned the practice of redirecting Internet users to a third-party portal when they mistype, or enter a nonexistent URL. You'll recall that the practice gained international attention when Verisign implemented their heavily-loathed Sitefinder initiative in 2003.

The National Advertising Division (NAD) of the Council of Better Business Bureau has recommended that Sprint stop running ads saying that the carrier has "America's most dependable 3G network." The recommendation comes after Verizon, fresh off of their lover's quarrel with AT&T, filed a complaint with the agency claiming that Sprint was using old data to support their claim. According to a NAD statement, Nielsen "drive test" data does confirm that Verizon's network has been more reliable of late: story continues..

It's fairly common practice for cable carriers to blame their often bi-annual TV rate increases on the high costs their incur from broadcasters. Time Warner Cable appears poised to take this traditional tactic to a new level.

Back in June, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) launched their terms of service tracker, which keeps an eye on company TOS for any changes that might be of interest to consumers. At launch the tracker didn't track any broadband ISPs, something the EFF told us they'd correct. They have, and now track 56 companies, including Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Time Warner Cable, Earthlink, T-Mobile and Sprint. The company has now announced that they've launched a new blog specifically dedicated to tracking company abuse of their customers through mouse print. The new resource tracks ongoing litigation and developments regarding AUP and TOS changes, and will provide white papers aimed at giving the average Internet user "a general background on many of the legal issues that surround Terms of Service agreements."

Since the project was announced, analysts have raised questions over whether Sprint and Clearwire's Mobile WiMax joint venture would have enough money to successfully fund a full deployment. Estimates to bring the service to 140 million POPs in fifty US markets ranged as high as $12 billion in some quarters, though Clearwire itself has always said they'd get the job done for considerably less.

TiVo's deals with cable operators and their recent DVR patent wins haven't done much to keep TiVo customers around. The company just suffered their worst quarter ever, losing 314,000 customers in three months. TiVo's market share (2.76 million) is now less than 8% of the estimated total 38 million US DVR households. TiVo would probably be helped greatly if Comcast would ever get around to their national TiVo deployment, but three years after the deal's announcement, TiVo for most Comcast customers is a nowhere to be found.

• UK Average mobile broadband speed only 0.87Mbits/sec [pcpro.co.uk]
• 3G wireless still holds promise [cnet.com]
• Iphone users sucking up half of the world's mobile networks' bandwidth [theinquirer.net]
• Clearwire Raises an Additional $920 Million for WiMAX Rollout [cellular-news.com]
• Infineon, Nokia agree to push LTE radios towards 1-Gbit/s [eetimes.com]
• Comcast sees more videos on-demand in NBC Universal [totaltele.com]
• San Fran Board Slated To Vote On Resolution Backing Network Neutrality [multichannel.com]
• Fring brings Skype video calls to mobile [theregister.co.uk]
• Apple wants life ban for clone maker Psystar [theregister.co.uk]

• FCC Wants More Input On Measuring Fixed Residential, Small Business Broadband [multichannel.com]
• Fox Studios calls for US to follow French anti-piracy law model [theinquirer.net]
• Sprint completes Virgin Mobile acquisition [fiercewireless.com]
• National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus asks Sprint to drop "Most Dependable" claim after Verizon objects [orlandosentinel.com]
• Expanding broadband Internet access subject of FCC chairman's talk in Arkansas [orlandosentinel.com]
• Mobile broadband may have problems identifying pirates [thinkbroadband.com]
• Rogers loses 'most reliable' title in B.C. court, says rival Telus [vancouversun.com]
• Hulu Telling Sites To Stop Embedding So Much [techdirt.com]
• Spam King Alan Ralsky Gets Four Years In Jail [techdirt.com]
• eBay offers compo for search failure [theregister.co.uk]