AT&T this morning reached out to us to note that after four months of negotiations, the telecom giant has struck a tentative agreement in the company's Midwest Region with the CWA. "This agreement covers some 18,500 employees in the states of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Ohio," AT&T spokesman Seth Bloom tells Broadband Reports. "Negotiations are continuing is all of our other regions, for contracts cover employees in every part of the country," says Bloom. Negotiations between AT&T and its union employees had broken down back in April, with workers authorizing a strike as a last resort.

Current contracts for some 125,000 CWA-represented AT&T employees expired April 4, except for an AT&T Southeast agreement, which expires in August. Efforts to bridge the differences between the company and its workers have thus-far failed, with workers authorizing a strike but continuing to work for the time being. Negotiations between AT&T and the Communications Workers Of America took a breather over the Easter holiday, but are set to continue tomorrow. In the interim, workers are getting attention for having created a "Ready To Strike" rap ringtone.

According to the Communications Workers of America, the union has authorized a strike should contract negotiations not go their way. Current contracts for some 125,000 CWA-represented AT&T employees expire April 4, except for an AT&T Southeast agreement, which expires in August. Citing profits this year of $12.9 billion despite a sour economy, the CWA laments that there's "no reason to hurt employees by cutting jobs and benefits." AT&T and CWA-represented AT&T Mobility workers recently went through the same process.

As AT&T insiders had told us, AT&T this week began offering DirecTV service to customers out of U-Verse range across their entire 22-state footprint. New customers willing to bundle DirecTV get $5 off for the double play, $10 off for the triple play, and $10 off plus $200 cash back if they bundle phone, DirecTV, DSL and wireless phone. Existing customers can supposedly call up and get the bundle discounts (let us know how that works in the comment section below). While AT&T is still supporting Dish Network and Homezone customers, they're no longer marketing those services to new customers.

2009 will be the year of the femtocell, a tech that creates a micro cell tower in your home that improves coverage and allows you to make calls over your broadband connection (easing strain on local towers is the primary perk for AT&T). AT&T has been testing femtocells in employee homes for some time, and recently stated they'll be engaging in a broader, "city-sized test" with customers in the second quarter of 2009.

User lev writes in to note that AT&T has sent an e-mail to its subscribers (full e-mail below the break) informing them that as of January 31, AT&T Internet users will no longer receiver Flickr Pro accounts. Flickr Pro accounts will be downgraded to regular Flickr accounts -- and all the restrictions that involves -- unless users are willing to pay $24.95 per year to upgrade.

Confirming what many managers were privately worried about back in October, AT&T today announced that the telco will be eliminating 12,000 jobs, or about four percent of the telcom giant's work force. According to an AT&T statement, the layoffs are a result of economic pressures, a changing business mix, and a more streamlined organizational structure. That's code for the economy sucks, the credit market sucks, their landline business is dying, new DSL subscriber additions are dismal, and they continue to purge redundant positions created by the BellSouth merger.

The Beaumont Enterprise is the first to report that AT&T has extended their trials of metered broadband into the Beaumont, Texas market. AT&T began testing metered billing last month in Reno, where DSL customers now face caps ranging from 20GB to 150GB.

A Kansas City jury has ordered AT&T to pay almost $17 million for overcharging customers via the Universal Service Fund (USF). As GAO studies (pdf) have stated for years, the USF is an unaccountable money pit -- where your money goes to carriers, but how and where it's spent (or if it even reaches under-served schools and communities) is never certain. According to the Associated Press, this particular case consolidated dozens of class-action lawsuits filed around the country concerning USF fraud. For their part, AT&T seems happy they weren't found guilty of a broader charge of conspiring with Sprint and MCI to milk customers via the USF:Sprint actually settled their involvement in the case back in September of last year for a cool $30 million.

At the FCC's hearing on broadband yesterday in Pittsburgh, AT&T Senior Federal Regulatory Vice President Robert Quinn said the company would be changing the way they advertise their broadband tiers. According to Quinn, the new system will change AT&T's practice of marketing their DSL tiers as "up to" the maximum potential speed.

Most people are familiar with the top three wireless carriers in the United States: AT&T, Verizon and Sprint. But not everyone can name the remaining seven in the country’s “top ten”.

Last week new AT&T CTO John Donovan let loose that the company will begin testing "usage-based pricing" starting this Fall. "Traffic on our backbone is growing 60 percent per year, but our revenue is not," complained Donovan. Today AT&T spokesman Michael Coe tells The Street that usage-based pricing is "inevitable." "Usage-based pricing is one way to deal fairly with Internet usage, which is very uneven among broadband users," says Coe. It's also a handy way to deal with Internet-delivery video providers who might compete with AT&T's U-Verse TV service.

AT&T is considering a move to usage-based pricing which would allow the company to continue to let BitTorrents thrive on the site but at a price to the people who are taking up all of the network’s capacity. The company says that it views BitTorrent users as a positive thing and wants to keep those customers but that it hasn’t been financially beneficial to build out a network that will support the small number of customers that are using the bulk of the network. The idea is that those people can better support the company’s growth by paying for the amount of bandwidth that they are using. It is believed that this new pricing model will begin in the fall.

Broadband Reports has learned that AT&T is toying with the idea of adding a service level agreement (SLA) to their higher speed residential tier. A survey that AT&T is conducting with select customers inquires if customers would be interested in an SLA for speed tiers 6Mbps or higher.

Back in February, AT&T announced that the company would be taking over T-Mobile’s hot spots inside of Starbucks locations across the nation. The rollout of that service has begun with San Antonio stores already receiving service; AT&T Wi-Fi access is planned to launch in 7,000 additional Starbucks stores on May 1st. The rollout will continue on a market-by-market basis throughout the year to the additional 10,000+ American stores. The service is a combination of paid and free wireless connection depending primarily on whether you’re already an AT&T U-Verse or broadband customer or will be a pay-as-you-go customer. T-mobile reminds its customer that their Starbucks service will remain unaffected for the next five years.

The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports that more than a year after AT&T acquired BellSouth, they're starting to eliminate a number of redundant management positions in BellSouth territory. The massive scale of the merger has made the process slow going. The company's pricing difference between BellSouth and AT&T's legacy thirteen State territories persists, but is something that should be remedied this year. As an aside, the company today announced they've expanded their VDSL-based IPTV service U-Verse into additional Sacramento-area communities.

AT&T's Group President John Stankey spoke at Merrill Lynch's Communications Forum today in New York, in the process taking a shot at cable broadband networks (webcast here). Stankey says that AT&T went into one of their cities, purchased cable broadband service for some 150 users (from the speed tiers cited, they appear to be Comcast connections), and then tested network performance.

Something of note for AT&T DSL subscribers who get free Wi-Fi access with their connections: Starbucks has dropped their relationship with T-Mobile and will now offer Wi-Fi service from AT&T/Wayport. The deal now gives AT&T more than 17,000 U.S.

Prepaid phones, such as AT&T Mobility’s GoPhone, are frequently trafficked by people who purchase them at a low cost and sell them for a much higher resale price. AT&T Mobility wants to stop the practice which eats their profits and so has filed a lawsuit against Texas-based prepaid phone traffickers Wireless Exclusive. Using an attorney who has extensive experience in hacking cases, AT&T Mobility hopes to regain the money lost to Wireless Exclusive (which they claim is in the millions) and to deter prepaid phone trafficking in the future.

If you're an AT&T DSL customer with a connection 1.5Mbps or faster, you've now got free, unlimited access to AT&T's network of 10,000 Wi-Fi hotspots. AT&T customers, who already got discounted access to the Wi-Fi network, should save about $60 annually from the deal.