The cable industry this week is busy patting itself on the back for a new initiative they've dubbed "Adoption Plus." According to the cable industry's chief lobbying and PR arm, the National Cable And Telecommunications Association, Adoption Plus has been created to "promote sustainable broadband adoption for a vitally important-but-vulnerable population" -- namely middle school-aged children in low income households without broadband. As such, the industry says they're offering discounted broadband to low income homes. In a blog post, NCTA boss Kyle McSlarrow highlights the plan as such:The NCTA was quickly praised by its usual group of yes men organizations and loyal lawmakers. AT&T's top lobbyist Jim Cicconi called the proposal "creative," while expressing how AT&T was eager to participate in the new program. Even new FCC boss Julius Genachowski issued a statement (pdf) praising the industry's "considerable investment" in the new project. Trade mags highlighted the new program with the usual lack of skepticism.

It's not particularly clear if any of them actually looked at the proposal first.

For one thing the program is simply a proposal, and it's not fully cooked yet.

If you're outside the range of terrestrial options, your only choice for broadband is a satellite broadband provider. Unfortunately, as our user reviews for Wild Blue and HughesNet will tell you -- satellite broadband barely earns the broadband title as it suffers from high latency, slow speeds, and very high prices.

You'll of course recall that back 2008 we were the first to report that Comcast was implementing a clear 250 GB usage cap for all users. Despite some grumbling, this was actually a good thing, given many Comcast users spent the better part of the decade complaining that Comcast was kicking people off of the network for "excessive consumption," without actually defining what "excessive" was.

According to the Washington Post, AT&T's chief lobbyist Jim Cicconi is upset with some comments made by White House deputy chief technology officer Andrew McLaughlin. In a recent blog post, McLaughlin noted that "if it bothers you that the China government does it, it should bother you when your cable company does it." McLaughlin is pretty obviously speaking generally about any restriction of data, be it by carrier or government.

Square Enix CEO Yoichi Wada last week opined that within the next ten years the game console will cease to exist -- at least in its current form. We're already seeing the life-cycles of gaming consoles extended courtesy of a constant stream of GUI and functionality upgrades delivered via broadband. The next step is making the console simply a dumb terminal with the network and remote servers doing the heavy lifting -- a segment OnLive is trying to tap into (though it will still likely take half a decade or more for this to arrive). Combined with the huge rise in casual browser-based games and the success of digital distribution platforms like Valve's Steam, Xbox Live and the Playstation Network, it's pretty clear that broadband has changed everything. Just keep an eye on those looming broadband caps and overage charges.

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.

40% of the money consumers pay into the Universal Service Fund goes to fund the FCC's E-Rate program, which was designed to help deliver telecom services to unserved areas, and deliver broadband service to libraries. The program has doled out more than $25 billion since its inception in 1998, but as the government itself often acknowledges, the FCC has never really bothered to track how this money is spent.

Earlier this month we noted that Verizon had started offering a trio of new prepaid wireless broadband options for those of you who couldn't find an open Wi-Fi hotspot, simply hate contracts, and don't mind paying a steep premium for bandwidth. Verizon now offers a $15, 75MB "day pass" plan, a $30, 250MB "week pass" plan, or a $50, 500MB "month pass" plan.

Comcast's dream of acquiring NBC Universal can't come to fruition until Vivendi executives sell their 20% stake in the company, according to the Los Angeles Times. Obviously the value of that 20% differs greatly depending on how much the company is deemed to be worth -- and according to the Times, Vivendi wants that number to be at least $500-$900 million greater than what's currently on the table. GE has placed a value on NBC Universal of $27 billion to $30 billion. While Vivendi and GE hash out the numbers, consumer advocates continue to lambast the deal as only really being good for industry executives, giving the companies yet more market power, and the authority to restrict competition from Hulu (which Comcast would gain control over after the deal).

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.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the FCC is seriously considering re-establishing some kind of open access rules, which would give new entrants access to incumbent infrastructure at reduced price. Open access was the central idea behind the 1996 telecom act, which required incumbent operators to share network access with smaller competitors in order to bolster competition as those upstarts grew into legitimate carriers.

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.

The country of Finland recently declared they were making broadband a legal right, requiring that all 5.3 million of the country's residents be served by 1 Mbps service by next summer, and 100 Mbps service by 2015. That's a little easier to do in a country like Finland, which has just 5.3 million residents to our 300+ million, and doesn't have to deal with things like, well, Montana.

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..

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.

Ask and ye shall receive. Windstream has confirmed to Broadband Reports that the company has raised the upstream speed of their DSL tiers. Windstream says they're responding to a request in our forums by users who found 386 kbps to be a little dated for 2009. Both the company's 3 Mbps and 6 Mbps tiers have seen the upstream side of the equation nudged from 384 kbps to 768 kbps -- at no additional price. The upgrades apparently started in early November and will be ongoing through December -- so if you haven't seen them yet, Broadband Reports readers can apparently nudge Windstream to get the upgrade now.

Jeffrey M. O'Brien over at Fortune is the latest American with a sluggish DSL connection to suffer from Asian broadband envy, noting that Hong Kong provider City Telecom offers symmetrical 100 Mbps broadband service for about $13 a month.

AT&T and Verizon's fight over 3G coverage maps just keeps rolling along, with Verizon recently running new ads that mock AT&T's wireless network, and AT&T lawyers working very hard yesterday to get those advertisements pulled by the courts. The decision to fight the ads doesn't seem to be all that wise, given the debate has simply managed to push the ads (and AT&T's recent network issues) further into the spotlight.

GigaOM directs our attention to an interesting video interview with Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who dissects Netflix's role as the premier application for broadband. Hastings discusses how the future for Netflix is bright, given the tendency to embed every consumer device with a $10 Wi-Fi chipset, and the fact that bandwidth prices continue to drop. He doesn't get into specific bandwidth costs for the Netflix streaming service, but he cites the fact that "Moore's law is an amazing thing" in a world where Amazon now charges 5 cents a gigabyte for bandwidth and you can transfer a movie for about a nickel. "What's fueling the whole system is the end users, who are paying $40-$60 to their ISP, and that's funding the whole system," says Hastings.