Charter Communications continues to battle with the company's lenders, who are trying to prevent the bankrupt cable company from exiting bankruptcy so they can appeal a court ruling approving the reorganization. Creditors have been fighting against Charter's reorganization plan all summer and fall, primarily because they don't like the pre-bankruptcy interest rates agreed to in the deal. "Hundreds of millions of dollars of additional interest and would put at peril the entire plan," Charter attorneys claim in court filings. Last week Charter executives indicated that a post-bankruptcy Charter would explore price hikes and metered billing for the company's customers.

Users in our Earthlink forum have been complaining about an Earthlink e-mail outage that began last Friday, and persisted through the weekend. While some users say their e-mail service has since been resolved, others say they were left without e-mail for more than three days. In conversations with Earthlink, the company says the issues are server failure related, but the company wouldn't get more specific. The problems appear to be impacting all Earthlink users, including dial-up, DSL and cable customers. The Wall Street Journal also noted the outage but similarly got no comment from Earthlink.

AOL continues an interesting trip that took them from one of the largest and most powerful ISPs on the Internet, to a fractured and financially-troubled company with dreams of becoming an advertising giant. Of course most of their problems were caused by their inability to adapt to (or really in some cases even recognize) the broadband market -- something that was at least in part caused by former executive Lisa Hook, who went on to do amazing things with VoIP carrier SunRocket as well. With its spin off from Time Warner, the company this fall has undergone its latest in an endless line of evolution efforts, but has announced those changes will come with pink slips for about one third of AOL's employees, or about 2,300 workers.

The CRTC earlier this year couldn't be bothered to come to the defense of independent ISPs facing extinction due to Bell Canada's sudden throttling efforts, but the regulatory agency amazingly came alive this week to stop the entry of a new wireless phone competitor in Canada. A CRTC ruling has banned Globalive, a new entrant into the Canadian market, from doing business in Canada.

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.

Users of the T-Mobile Sidekick have been writing in to complain about a week-plus outage, and now they're being informed that they'll be losing personal data as well. According to a post made over at the T-Mobile website and the Wall Street Journal, problems with Microsoft servers have resulted in a total data loss for any data not backed up on users' personal devices.

There's been a growing call from investors like Craig Moffett for AT&T to ditch their $30 unlimited data plan and migrate to a pure per-byte billing model for the iPhone. Why? iPhone users like to use data, and higher overages means more money.

Users in our VoIP forum indicate that VoIP provider Callcentric has been having a national outage since around 11AM EST, something users say is fairly uncommon for the operator. The company's website has also been up and down for much of the day. "All our engineers and developers were notified about 30 seconds after it started by both internal and external monitoring systems," says the company. "We sincerely apologize for this outage and once we have restored service we will be investigating the cause further." These are the kinds of outages VoIP operators can't afford to have with cable operators consistently gobbling up the lion's share of VoIP customers.

AT&T's new self-proclaimed "blogger guy" Seth Bloom has been tasked with damage control in the face of AT&T's recent wireless network congestion PR problems. While Bloom put a welcome human face on a company that's traditionally seen as anything but during the iPhone 3GS launch, he's now being asked to play PR point guard on what's becoming an increasingly volatile public relations problem for AT&T.

Charter founder Paul Allen got a stern talking to yesterday in a Manhattan bankrupcty court. According to the New York Post, US Bankruptcy Court Judge James Peck asked Allen's personal financial rep if it "appears somewhat unseemly for a person as wealthy as Allen" to be benefiting financially from the cable operator's bankruptcy plan. Charter's restructuring calls for Allen to be paid around $200 million and is tailored specifically to lessen Paul Allen's personal tax burden. Despite the fact that Charter has never been profitable and suffers from some of the worst customer support in the business, company CEO Neil Smit has also had a very profitable implosion.

Part of the continuing problem with the telecom sector (well, most sectors, and not just in the States) is that there's a revolving door between industry lobbyists and regulators, which creates a legion of regulators who simply nod dumbly at corporations as they search for their next paying gig. While that's certainly their individual right, that obviously leaves regular users in the dust, since there's just no money in giving a damn about consumers.

We've well documented how Fairpoint Communications has all-but imploded from the acquisition of Verizon's Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont DSL networks. The carrier has skirted close to bankruptcy, faces state investigations for incompetence, and is now looking at a possible delisting by the NYSE.

Charter's been stuck in a tussle with the company's creditors for most of the summer, the company trying to eliminate $8 billion of the company's $22 billion debt load while keeping Paul Allen in control of the company. According to the New York Post, the two sides are no longer even negotiating, which means the fight will be settled next month in court. Apparently if the banks win, and are able to repossess Charter and change its ownership structure, founder Paul Allen would be personally responsible for more than $1 billion in taxes, notes the Post.

With the network neutrality circus back in town, the use of bogus grass roots groups (aka "astroturf") is again on the upswing as corporations lobby Uncle Sam to prevent network neutrality legislation. Such misleadingly named groups (grandmothers for network justice?) are used by corporations in every sector to give the illusion of broad consumer support for ideas that are anti-consumer.

One Verizon customer in Queens is suing Verizon (via Consumerist) after a call for technical support resulted in a beating. Verizon technician Robert Benjamin allegedly punched, then choked customer Aubrey Isakson after Isakson asked for identification. After taking several shots to the face and breaking his glasses, Isakson fled and fractured his ankle. Verizon tells the NY Post they have "zero tolerance for any sort of unethical or illegal behavior," but that they've kept the tech on staff because his "conduct has been blameless" in subsequent months and the tech was officially never charged with a crime. There was no charge because the DA's office offered the tech a deal if he stayed out of trouble for six months.

Last month, news outlets began digging into mobile operator Zer01, and noting that the company was engaged in some dubious marketing endeavors with some questionable people, and despite promising dirt cheap mobile VoIP and data, still hadn't shown anybody a concrete product. The company has been trying to salvage things by blaming most of the problems on MLM partners Buzzirk and Global Verge, and yesterday took things further by announcing they'd terminated their relationship with both companies.

While a growing number of ISPs (even some of the smaller ones) now use Twitter to provide direct customers support, they might be having a hard time of it today. The social networking website in a blog post notes that they're working to counter the attack and keep the site online. "We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate," co-founder Biz Stone writes. While Comcast pioneered the use of the site for customer support, the vast majority of broadband ISPs have since followed suit.

As we noted earlier this month, a new company by the name of Zer01 has been getting a lot of attention for their promise of unlimited voice and data on smart phones for $69.95/month. There's quite a few (huge) catches, including the fact that the voice component is really VoIP with Zer01 operating as a mobile virtual network enabler (MVNE) -- who delivers service and phones to mobile virtual network operators (MVNO).

A Fairpoint Communications SEC filing recently indicated the company was having trouble paying creditors, and might have to file for bankruptcy. According to the Portland Press Herald, FairPoint Communications also owes more than $845,000 to competitive local phone carriers in Maine for giving them poor wholesale service, but Fairpoint is asking the Maine Public Utilities Commission to discard the penalties. All told, Fairpoint owes smaller operators about $2.8 million across New England for problems related to their inability to integrate Verizon's networks.

In March we discussed how Dish Network was sued for violating the Federal Do Not Call list by the Federal government and four States (California, Illinois, Ohio and North Carolina), At the time, Dish proclaimed that an independent audit revealed no violations, while heavily inferring that any violations may have been the fault of a reseller. This week Dish Network decided to settle, agreeing to pay $5.99 million to 46 different states for the company's marketing practices. The settlement resolves the states’ allegations that DISH Network:

•Refused to accept responsibility for the misconduct of its third-party retailers and installers;
•Made telemarketing calls to consumers in violation of No Call laws;
•Failed to disclose the complete terms and conditions of their customer agreements, including the availability of rebates, credits and free offers;
•Did not disclose that purchased or leased equipment was previously used and/or refurbished;
•Made reference to competitors’ price offers when the goods or services being compared were substantially different; and,
•Charged customer credit cards and debited bank accounts without providing adequate notice and obtaining appropriate authorization.

Back in 2003, Dish Network faced similar complaints by Colorado and 12 other states.