Verizon is working with the Bloomberg administration to speed up the deployment of fiber installs beneath the street of New York City. According to Bloomberg, Verizon will begin testing "micro-trenching" or "saw cutting," which involves cutting shallower-than-usual grooves in the ground for fiber laying (video here). Verizon will test the installation technology in twelve markets then discuss with the city whether to proceed from there. Verizon signed a franchise agreement in 2008 that is supposed to bring FiOS to everyone in NYC by the end of 2014 (they're probably currently at around 50% or less). However, the agreement fine print allows Verizon to buy or wiggle their way out of 100% deployment, which means a lot of people across the five boroughs are going to wind up disappointed no matter how deeply Verizon digs their trenches.

Everyone in the mobile ecosystem, from app developers to your carrier, is now collecting every shred of mobile location data that isn't nailed down and are busily selling that data to whoever wants to buy it, from civil engineers to marketing agencies. Consumer privacy protections here are virtually nonexistent, and the companies making billions off of your daily life have been busy arguing that there are no need for new protections because the data they collect is anonymized.

However, a new study by MIT and the Catholic University of Louvain studied fifteen months' worth of "anonymized" collected data from 1.5 million people, and found that people's routines are unique and predictable enough that ferreting out their identity is incredibly easy using just for location logs:If that location data is poorly secured, combining it with other databases creates unique and new privacy violation possibilities the researchers say we haven't really even fully started to fathom yet. The scientists tell the BBC they're not advocating that we stop collecting this data, though they do suggest we need to stop pretending it's truly anonymous, and consider additional privacy protections.

A new report from research firm OpenSignal found that T-Mobile LTE is currently live in nine United States cities ahead of the company's official network launch expected tomorrow. Only Kansas City and Las Vegas were specifically mentioned as launch markets, though the firm notes they've also seen significant LTE presence in Seattle, Denver, New Orleans, New York, San Diego, and the Bay Area.

AT&T has been speeding up their LTE deployment of late, this week announcing that AT&T LTE is now available in 158 markets. That total includes launches this week in Sebring, Florida, Athens, Georgia, and Dyersburg and Ripley, Tennessee -- on top of launches last week in Cleveland, Williamsburg, and Augusta. In addition to a faster pace on LTE deployment, AT&T is enjoying some awards for network performance. Rootmetrics was the latest to recently declare that AT&T's current LTE is notably faster than LTE from either Verizon or Sprint -- hopefully a trend that continues as the network gets more saturated.

The folks over at the Google Fiber blog have announced that the company's 1 Gbps fiber service is expanding into some additional markets -- just probably not yours. Google Fiber community manager Rachel Hack states that the Olathe, Kansas city council has given the green light for Google Fiber to be expanded to that city, about twenty minutes away from Kansas City. "We think that Fiber and widespread Internet access will help to create jobs, grow local businesses, and make Olathe even stronger as it grows," insists the search giant. The Kansas City Star notes that the agreement involves providing free 1 Gbps connections to four public facilities for up to 10 years.

ITU Secretary General Hamadoun Touré has proposed a new plan that would aim to have the entire world wired with 20 Mbps, $20 connections by 2020. At a meeting focused on technology gender equality and the shoring up the provisioning of broadband access to women, Touré unveiled the goal, naming it "Goal 20-20 by 2020." As it stands, the ITU's only real guideline on this front is to urge all countries to have some kind of broadband plan, something countries are of course free to ignore. How we get to 20/20 by 2020 isn't clear; getting 20 Mbps to parts of rural United States is already a significant challenge, before even considering the significantly poorer regions of the planet.

Last week we noted that Georgia lawmakers shot down a law proposed by Windstream and AT&T that would have made it illegal for a town to wire itself with broadband in a zip code if just one person in that area had 3 Mbps service. Consumer groups like Public Knowledge are of course cheering the defeat. "The defeat of this bill shows that the state-level agenda pushed by AT&T, which manages to be both deregulatory (for AT&T) and regulatory (in passing laws preventing others from entering the market) at the same time, can be defeated when policymakers can see its consequences," says Public Knowledge's John Bergmayer. While the win is heartening, it's important to remember that carriers will try again; it took Time Warner Cable five years and four different bills to pass anti-community broadband laws in North Carolina.

Georgia's absurd anti-community broadband bill is of course only the latest in a decade long effort by incumbent ISPs to ban communities from wiring themselves -- even if the local operator refuses to. The Wall Street Journal notes that with the recent passage of similar rules in North and South Carolina, 19 states now have laws in place -- all of them written by incumbent ISPs -- either banning or greatly hindering community broadband improvement efforts.

Sprint today announced that they've expanded their LTE wireless network footprint to nine additional markets. According to a Sprint announcement, Sprint LTE is now available in Altoona, Pennsylvania, Asheville, North Carolina, Columbus, Indiana, Elkhart/Goshen, Indiana, Hammond, Louisiana, La Crosse, Wisconsin, San Juan, Puerto Rico, Statesville, North Carolina, and Temple, Texas. The launches continue Sprint's heavy focus on smaller niche markets that might not yet be covered by Verizon and AT&T's LTE deployment. With these launches, Sprint LTE is now available in parts of 67 different markets.

A controversial bill concocted by AT&T, Windstream and CenturyLink to prevent communities from wiring themselves with broadband continues to move forward, despite heavy criticism from both locals and industry. The bill initially banned any town or city from deploying its own broadband services if just one user in a zip code had a line capable of 1.5 Mbps.

U.S. Cellular, who recently topped Forrester's wireless customer satisfaction rankings, says they're planning to expand LTE coverage to 87% of the company's customers by the end of 2013. According to a company statement, 61% of the comopany's customers currently have access to 4G LTE speeds, and 87% (or about 3,800 additional cities and towns) are expected to be covered by the end of the year. The company says locations like Lincoln and Omaha, Nebraska; Manhattan, Kansas; Eureka and Ukiah, California are next on the list for new LTE service, with LTE expansion planned for fourteen states.

A very reliable source inside Comcast tells me that the new speeds being seen by many of our users in the Northeast should be appearing for the rest of you in March. Last summer an anonymous tipster sent a leaked screenshot of what would ultimately be Comcast's new speed offerings.

Benjamin N. Cardozo School Professor Susan Crawford's new book Captive Audience has been pissing off all the right people in DC and at major carriers the last few weeks by highlighting the industry's lack of competition.

While investing some money into broadband infrastructure (especially given the amount we spend on war) is not a bad idea, implementation in many states has been problematic. West Virginia has probably been the poster child for corruption and incompetence when it comes to broadband stimulus funds, the state (with Verizon's help) spending millions on over-power, unused routers and expensive consultants who apparently don't actually do anything.

Sprint CEO Dan Hesse this morning confirmed that Sprint's a little further behind on LTE than they had hoped to be at this point. "We are behind our original objectives with Network Vision," stated Hesse on a conference call with press and analysts.

Sprint this morning announced that their faster LTE network has now come online in portions of Boston. The company says the new network will be available in Barnstable/Hyannis/Mid-Cape, New Bedford/Fall River, and Peabody areas of Massachusetts. In addition to Boston, Sprint today stated they launched LTE in Austin, Texas; Bryan/College Station, Texas; Columbia, Tenn.; Emporia, Kansas; Fort Wayne, Indiana; Gettysburg, Pennsylvania; and Western Puerto Rico (including Aguadilla, Isabela, Cabo Rojo, Mayagüez). Sprint says that with these launches, their LTE network is now available in portions of 58 markets.

Continuing the company's insistence that the LTE markets you've been waiting for are just around the corner, Sprint this week proclaimed that 28 New LTE markets will be "coming soon." According to a company press release, the upcoming launch list contains markets like Nacogdoches, Texas and Hot Springs Arkansas, continuing Sprint's early focus on smaller markets. According to Sprint employees, "coming soon" in Sprint's lexicon actually means "sometime in the next six months." Meanwhile a lot of those larger markets Sprint insisted were right around the corner (like New York City and Los Angeles) continue to be AWOL.

Speaking at CES this week, Verizon stated they began this new year with 473 LTE markets, covering 273.5 million potential customers. Verizon's LTE network currently covers close to 89% of their United States wireless footprint, and by the middle of the year LTE will be available in every market currently seeing 3G (EVDO) service. "Using LTE...we'd love to broadcast the Super Bowl in the 2014 time frame," CEO Lowell McAdam said at CES. Verizon has previously stated their goal is to sunset their current 2G/3G networks by 2021. The company's next big noticeable step will be to deploy voice over LTE (VoLTE) in 2014.

For a company whose U-Verse fiber to the node broadband service has consistently under-performed in the battle against cable, AT&T executives were very confident in future U-Verse speed claims while speaking at their developer conference this week at CES. AT&T recently announced that they'd be expanding their U-Verse footprint from 24.5 million homes to 33 million, though the company used some fuzzy math to make the expansion seem much larger than it was.

Despite the FCC's claim that they were going to revolutionize data collection (and shockingly actually use real-world data to inform policy), coverage maps continue to struggle with accuracy thanks to large carriers who'd prefer coverage gaps remain mysterious. Inaccurate maps based on incorrect FCC data could threaten broadband funding in Mississippi, since FCC data insists the state is largely covered in broadband.