Last year AT&T launched AT&T Plus, a trial customer loyalty rewards program that offered such perks as waived upgrade fees, waived activation fees (for the second line only), 25% off any accessories not made by Apple, and things like Starbucks gift cards. The program was only initially deployed in Colorado, Minneapolis, and Houston, but is being terminated by AT&T before it gets deployed further. AT&T has started sending letters out to users stating that the royalty program is ending as of March 31. AT&T is giving those users a $25 perpaid Visa gift card, but isn't explaining why they didn't proceed nationally with the rewards program.

After AT&T's attempted takeover of T-Mobile was blocked by regulators, it didn't take T-Mobile long to re-embrace its role of industry upstart, launching a series of ad campaigns that took pot shots at AT&T. Now AT&T's returning the favor.

AT&T and Verizon have expended their share of the video on demand market, stealing that market share from companies like Comcast and Time Warner Cable. Todd Spangler at Multichannel News notes that cable operators saw their VOD total market share drop to 56% in 2012 from 60% in 2013. For some context however, keep in mind that video on demand comprises about 1% of all video viewing according to a study released last year. That study blamed "inadequate advertising support and awkward program guides" for cable's recent stumbles in the VOD market, something telcos -- who are hungrier upstarts in the pay TV sector -- are clearly doing a better job with. What's your primary reason for not renting VOD titles? Quality? Selection? Price?

Yesterday we noted that despite the copyright industry's new "six strikes" anti-piracy campaign launch, just one ISP had bothered to put anything about the plan on their website. AT&T sent us a statement justifying their lack of website information by saying they intend to communicate directly with impacted users.

If you happen to live in an area that has what passes for United States broadband competition, you're probably all too aware of the massive load of junk mail you get from carriers. Here in New York, you could probably build an entire second home out of the junk mail received from Cablevision, Comcast and Verizon, as the three companies engage in bundle promotion battles.

One Consumerist reader decided to save and photograph an entire year of AT&T U-Verse junk mail, and the results are very impressive.

Where we live the variety of marketing pitches is always fun, ranging from shiny flyers to official-looking documents that proclaim to be time sensitive and require you carefully rip off each end -- only to deliver more triple play spam.

AT&T over the weekend got about as close as they're likely to in admitting they messed up the acquisition of T-Mobile. "I wouldn't say it was a bad decision, but it was a decision that didn't go the way I wanted," AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said at a conference over the weekend. "We didn't execute well."

Granted a big reason the deal fell through is because AT&T kept repeatedly lying to regulators about job creation and deal benefits, lies that in at least one instance were debunked by AT&T's own attorney who accidentally posted un-redacted documents online for everyone to see.

Aside from the fact that killing off T-Mobile was anti-competitive (and, as it has turned out, totally unnecessary), AT&T hubris was a major reason the deal fell through, and there's little to no indication AT&T learned much of anything from the whole affair.

Former Virginia Demoratic Congressman Rick Boucher used to have a lot of nerd credibility in the technology field, urging regulators to aim high when it came to broadband goals, while being one of the pre-eminent voices for fair use rights. What has been he doing since leaving Congress? Working for AT&T as a paid sockpuppet, penning pro-AT&T editorials in major news outlets without disclosing his ties to AT&T.

Originally, AT&T only allowed users to use Facetime over Wi-Fi. Then, they allowed Facetime over cellular, but only if users signed up for their new shared data plan with its $15 per gigabyte overage fees.

As we discussed back in 2010, AT&T's "Microcell" service essentially acts as a miniature cell tower in a user's home -- routing cell calls over the user's broadband. While these femtocell services are useful for users with poor reception, telco business models have often crippled the devices.

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.

A prodigious patent troll is now taking aim at ISPs large and small, hoping to extract cash from ISPs for simply using DSL gear. According to numerous court filings, a company by the name of Brandywine Communications Technologies is on a suing spree, claiming that numerous ISPs have violated seven different DSL-related patent Brandywine claims to own.

As we noted last month, the Senate Judiciary Committee had been working on an update to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 that would have strengthened consumer e-mail privacy protections, requiring that the government obtain a warrant before snooping user e-mail or remotely stored data (like cloud storage). It was a surprising direction for a government that has relentless pushed to eliminate all citizen privacy protections, so not too surprisingly the Amendment has been killed without explanation:Current law allows the government to sift through emails and other cloud data without a warrant provided the data has been stored for 180 days or more. However, with wiretaps installed at most large carriers providing the government user communications in real time, it's believed that those laws are generally laughed at by intelligence services.

Back in February we noted that AT&T, the company that really started the network neutrality debate to begin with, had come up with yet another awful new idea: charging app makers a fee if they wanted to reach consumers without hitting their usage caps.

While AT&T presented the idea as akin to a 1-800 number for data or "free shipping," what it actually is a troll toll imposed by AT&T allowing them to rake in new cash -- and impose their power on a content ecosystem that operates better with AT&T out of the way.

"White space" broadband, a technology that rides on the unlicensed spectrum freed by the migration to digital television, only recently got off the ground and has significant potential promise as a new, inexpensive, long range niche wireless alternative. As such, wireless carriers like AT&T have been trying their best to kill it in the metaphorical cradle to prevent potential future competitors.

We've noted repeatedly how privacy technology discussions often have a bizarre and amusing lack of context, the press getting borderline hysterical about every NebuAD or CarrierIQ scandal, while ignoring that carriers and the government buy, sell and trade all user information daily with only a fleeting regard for law.

Time and time again we've seen folks come forward with evidence of carriers like AT&T, Sprint and Verizon simply dumping all live traffic in the government's lap in violation of law (which they simply change when they get caught).

See update at bottom of post. AT&T has removed tools and functionality for some grandfathered unlimited data wireless users that allowed them to track and monitor their data consumption.

I've noted that while a lot of the talk of the UN "taking over the Internet" is American business interest hyperbole, international telcos have been using the upcoming talks about Internet governance to push the international telco dream of forcing content companies to subsidize network builds. It's a cash grab by government-pampered monopolists, plain and simple.

After previously saying they'd only back off of Facetime restrictions for some users, AT&T quietly this week started letting everyone -- including grandfathered unlimited iPhone users -- use the feature they paid for. Originally, AT&T only allowed users to use Facetime over Wi-Fi.

Time Warner Cable's "six strikes" anti-piracy measures won't include the filtering of any websites, Broadband Reports has learned. The six strikes plan, scheduled to launch later this year, will vary from ISP to ISP -- with Verizon last week acknowledging they'll be throttling repeat offenders to an as-yet-unspecified speed.

AT&T's recently announced DSL expansion may not be all it was cracked up to be after closer examination. AT&T announced in a press release on November 7 that they'd be expanding their U-Verse coverage total from 24.5 million homes to 33 million, suggesting an additional 8.5 million new users.