In 2008, UK telco British Telecom announced a widely lauded plan to invest in "fiber" (to the node), though the specifics weren't particularly impressive when you looked a little closer, and the "fiber to the press release" announcement was more about getting a regulatory back rub from the British Government and lots of taxpayer subsidies. Upon inspection, British Telecom's plan still left a lot of potential customers out of reach of broadband. Unless of course you're a Chairman for British Telecom, in which case, as the Register notes, you get to take part in a special trial nobody else can participate in:The fact that a British Telecom exec can suddenly get a "trial" of 1 Mbps SHDSL service in a town that's been asking for broadband for five years has apparently upset a lot of people, judging from the significant British news coverage of the snub. It's good to be the King.

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.

It doesn't seem like that long ago that we chatted with AT&T about a lack of U-Verse deployment in BellSouth territory. Things on that front went slowly the first year or so after AT&T's BellSouth acquisition in 2006, but things have definitely been speeding up in 2009, with launches in Alabama, Tennessee, Louisiana and elsewhere. Expansion continues this week with U-verse popping up in Knoxville, Tennessee, and U-Verse VoIP expanding into Columbia, South Carolina and Charlotte, North Carolina. According to AT&T earnings released last week, AT&T now serves 1.8 million U-Verse customers nationally, adding 240,000 in the third quarter.

Verizon gave us a nudge today to note that the first hurdle in their mega-deal with Frontier has been jumped -- namely Frontier received shareholder approval. The $8.5 billion deal would infuse Frontier (which currently has 2.3 million customers) with 4.8 million new residential and small-business phone lines across 14 states, 1 million broadband connections, and 11,000 former Verizon employees. That huge sudden growth in subscribers and debt is what killed the last two major Verizon efforts to offload their rural subscribers in Hawaii and New England, meaning regulators will be under serious pressure not to rubber stamp the deal.

Verizon unveiled their third quarter earnings this morning, and as suspected, wireless service continued to be the company's biggest growth engine. Verizon Wireless added 1.2 million net new customers, bringing their wireless subscriber total to 89 million.

When AT&T and Verizon were pushing for "franchise reform" laws to ease their entry into the pay TV market, they spent a lot of time promising how the laws would lower TV prices. In reality, the laws were largely wish lists giving the baby bells anything they wanted, including veto power over eminent domain laws, weaker local authority, the legal right to cherry pick broadband deployment, and fewer consumer protections.

Rumors now suggest that Verizon's new Android-based Droid phone could be officially announced on October 28, and launched on November 9. Many people are getting postcards inviting them to Motorola and Verizon's October 28 press event. Droid is Verizon's attempt to take on AT&T and the iPhone, and early impressions of the device seem very positive -- though given Verizon's history with closed networks and crippled devices, you have to wonder where the catch will be. The Droid launch is so important to both companies, Verizon and Google have even started pretending they don't hate each other.

With the problems faced by Fairpoint and Hawaii Telcom after integrating Verizon's unwanted DSL networks, Verizon's even more ambitious plan to offload an even bigger chunk of rural customers to Fairpoint is getting added scrutiny. The $8.5 billion deal, if approved, would infuse Frontier (which currently has 2.3 million customers) with 4.8 million new residential and small-business phone lines across 14 states, 1 million broadband connections, and 11,000 former Verizon employees.

Last summer Verizon hinted that they were gearing up to offer discounts for bundling wireless service with TV, DSL or FiOS (they currently only offer wireless users one bill). Today Verizon announced that those bundles had arrived -- at least for consumers in their Northeast and Mid-Atlantic markets.

The unions employees who warned regulators that Fairpoint wasn't equipped to handle the acquisition of Verizon's New England DSL and landline networks last year are rightfully saying "we told you so." As Fairpoint teeters toward possible bankruptcy, union officials tell Vermont locals that they can thank Verizon for all the fun everyone's having. Instead of simply selling to the highest bidder, Verizon used a Reverse Morris Trust to incur huge tax savings while dumping a huge debt load on Fairpoint.

As we've been exploring, both AT&T and Verizon absolutely despise Google. Why? Because the company represents an Internet future where phone companies are relegated to "dumb pipe" network operators, and more innovative and adaptable companies wind up making a killing in the content and service business.

According to the EFF, the Obama Administration is doing everything in its power to keep the public away from documents that would show the depth of AT&T and Verizon lobbying efforts aimed at getting immunity for their involvement in the government's warrantless wiretap program. In a website post, the EFF says that despite a Judge ruling that the government must hand over the lobbying documents, the Obama Administration continues to stall via a series of emergency motions aimed at keeping those documents sealed.

According to an announcement by DSL provider Windstream Communications (see our user reviews here), the company will be laying off roughly 5% of their workforce (350 out of 7,100 jobs) in order to "offset revenue pressure in the residential voice business." In other words Windstream, like larger telco Verizon, is making cuts to help counter the continuing death of the copper landline. The company, originally spun off from Alltel Communications (now part of Verizon), passed the one million broadband subscriber mark last Spring.

As we discussed at length last week, network neutrality is about incumbent phone companies trying to hold on to market power in the face of Internet evolution, some of which just happens to be coming from Google. One such example is how AT&T and Apple (despite denials) prevented Google Voice from coming to the iPhone, in order to protect the companies' mobile OS and MMS/voice businesses.

If you've paid attention, you know the modern "network neutrality" debate took off in 2005, when then AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre proudly, though dumbly, proclaimed that Google got a "free ride" on his network. According to Ed, this unfairness could only be rectified by charging companies who already pay for bandwidth money to ensure their traffic reaches AT&T consumers quickly.

West Virginia Attorney General Darrell McGraw has come out against Verizon's plan to offload millions of rural DSL and landline customers to Frontier Communications. The $8.5 billion deal, if approved, would infuse Frontier (which currently has 2.3 million customers) with 4.8 million new residential and small-business phone lines across 14 states, 1 million broadband connections, and 11,000 former Verizon employees."We have serious problems with this," Deputy Attorney Fran Hughes said last week. "We don't think Frontier has the ability financially to live up to the commitments it has made to the PSC." Obviously the concerns mirror those we heard before Verizon offloaded its New England markets to Fairpoint, and we of course know how that turned out.

Alongside the Postal Service, Verizon this week was awarded the title of one of the "Most Trusted Companies for Privacy" by the Ponemon Institute and TRUSTe. Verizon is the second most trusted company, according to a survey of 6,486 adults, and an "an expert review panel at the Ponemon Institute" which judged the companies on a "rigorous" list of criteria that included the clarity and readability of privacy statements, policy change notice, access to account information, cookie management, and data sharing practices.

Verizon has already cut 8,000 jobs in the last twelve months, and during the company's second quarter earnings conference call announced they'd be laying off another 8,000 employees during the second half of this year. But that's just the beginning according to Verizon CFO John Killian, who told attendees at an investor conference this week that the company needs to lay off even more workers, and at an "accelerated pace." While some of the layoffs are because of the housing market and Verizon's slowly dying residential phone business, the company is also making a very intentional move away from rural connectivity so they can focus on more immediately profitable urban and suburban FiOS and wireless delivery. While investors welcome the news, the employees themselves are somewhat annoyed that Verizon's canning employees while posting record profits.

After quietly soft launching their new video portal earlier this month, AT&T has now officially announced their new "AT&T Entertainment" video portal. According to the AT&T press release, the portal offers free TV shows and movie clips "via an agreement with Hulu," which is apparently why it looks very similar to Hulu itself. As it stands, the offering is little more than a placeholder for AT&T's future Internet TV ambitions, be they online content that's integrated with their U-Verse service, or part of an authentication "TV Everywhere" system. So why not just go to Hulu? Good question, and one that AT&T's going to have to answer in short order.

It's been made fairly clear that as Verizon loses the ability to lock down their phones and network (forcing consumers toward their wireless handset content), the carrier is going to make up for it by squeezing the pipe and imposing some steep per-byte charges. A recently leaked Verizon memo gave insight into the company's new wireless pricing plans for Internet-enabled handsets not quite powerful enough to be considered "smartphones": $9.99 for 25MB (50 cents each additional MB) or $19.99 for 75MB (30 cents each additional MB).