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.

J.D. Power and Associates has released their 2009 Internet Service Provider Residential Customer Satisfaction Study, which ranks ISPs on five factors: performance and reliability; cost of service; customer service; billing; and offerings and promotions.

A new report by Sandvine Corporation confirms what other reports this month from Cisco and Arbor Networks also suggested: P2P's share of overall capacity is down, and video use of all kinds is exploding. The study tracked traffic from 20 carriers and 24 million subscribers, mirroring much of what Cisco recently reported. Namely, that Internet "prime time" is later than TV prime time, and live video use is surging. Sandvine says that 26.6 percent of total traffic is "real-time entertainment traffic" (video, gaming, music), while P2P use dropped from 32% to 20%. As we noted the other day this doesn't mean P2P is "dying."

In the past few weeks, two different Internet traffic studies from Cisco and Arbor networks have indicated that P2P's overall Internet capacity consumption is down. Or more accurately, that P2P's slice of the Internet capacity pie is starting to be dwarved by quickly growing video consumption. Cisco's study (which we covered yesterday) pretty clearly indicates this relativity, but Arbor's indicated that P2P traffic had "declined dramatically, leading to reports that P2P was "dying." Of course GigaOM (via Techdirt) notes this relativity, but there's something else in the piece that seems more pertinent:In other words, Arbor indicates that as ISPs crack down harder on P2P use, more P2P users are using encryption and as such can't be tracked. That would seem to suggest the numbers may not only be relative -- they may be completely wrong.

Back in 2004, Intel was busy hyping WiMax as "the most important thing since the Internet itself," and blogs and technology analysts were prematurely proclaiming the wireless technology a third pipe competitor to DSL and cable. At the time we tried to temper some of that enthusiasm, noting that WiMax most likely would be a niche player in a very big pond.

1.5 million North American new homes signed up for to fiber-to-the-home service last year, bringing the continent's total to 5.3 million, according to the latest study by the Fiber To The Home Council. According to the group, the number of homes passed (a term that doesn't always mean the service is actually available) with fiber grew to 17.2 million from 13.8 million one year earlier. While there's hundreds of cooperatives, small telcos and municipal outfits deploying fiber, Verizon takes up the lion's share of that 5.3 million total, serving roughly 3.1 million FiOS Internet customers and 2.5 million FiOS TV customers.

A new study by the University of Oxford in England and the University of Oviedo in Spain measured broadband speed and latency in some 66 countries and 240 cities, ranking countries on their ability to handle next-generation broadband applications and services and the quality of a nation's broadband connections. Mirroring the results of most other studies, South Korea and Japan take the top two spots, while the United States ranks fifteenth behind countries such as Lithuania, Denmark and the Netherlands.

For a few years, satellite broadband provider WildBlue was limited in the number of new customers they could add, because they lacked the capacity to actually serve them. This has generally been reflected in mediocre reviews (fairly common among satellite broadband carriers) and very low usage caps (pdf) that throttle user connections back to 28kbps downstream and 28kbps upstream. Earlier this month the carrier at least opened the door to more customers, adding a chunk of new capacity courtesy of Echostar. The company now says they've officially passed the 400,000 subscriber mark.

Remember how the entrance of the phone companies into the TV business was supposed to lower TV prices? Well, that didn't happen. But at least one economist seems to think that this year's cable TV rate hike season will be a little less painful than in years' past. Gregory Crawford, former chief economist at the FCC turned economics professor, believes that this fall and next springs TV rate hikes will be 50% of what they were in year's past. While hikes are partially driven by higher programming costs, cable operators may have to start eating some of these costs to remain competitive (surely an executive or two could take a pay cut?). Of course cable customers who've been hearing this for a decade will wisely want to see it to believe it.

The second quarter is traditionally the slowest for broadband growth each year anyway, but the housing market and a saturated broadband customer base is responsible for Q2 having the slowest broadband growth for the Unites States in eight years. According to new research by the Leichtman Group, the nineteen largest cable and telephone providers in the country, who collectively control 93% of the market, added just 634,000 in the second quarter.

As the government continues to work on crafting our first national broadband plan, there's been a lot of talk about how that process is consumer-centric, transparent, and data-driven. The FCC has spent the last few months talking about how they might actually start using real data to make policy decisions (astounding).

While other countries may be a little quicker to tap HSPA's full potential with speeds nearing 20Mbps, AT&T leads the world in terms of total number of HSDPA customers. The telecom giant now serves 28.6 million HSPA customers, which accounts for 21% of all HSPA subscriptions worldwide.

According to a new study by Parks Associates, the number of households worldwide with broadband will approach 650 million by 2013. The number of broadband households worldwide grew by over 18% in 2008 to exceed 400 million. According to the stat farm, Asia-Pacific is the largest market with 160 million subscribers, the region having over 49% of the global market share by 2013. For an important sense of context and scale, the Earth's total population is estimated by the U.S. Census Bureau to be somewhere around 6.77 billion.

According to a new report by Juniper Research, LTE wireless broadband technology will see over 100 million subscribers by 2014. According to the firm, roughly thirty different network operators have committed to the LTE upgrade track. While enterprise customers will be signing up for the new service early, most consumers won't be getting on board until 2013 or so. A similar recent study by Pyramid Research predicted 136 million global LTE users by 2014. While it took six years for UMTS/HSPA technology to reach the 100 million subscriber milestone, Pyramid expects LTE to hit that mark in just four.

In what's a bit of refreshing news for an agency that's been, well, scientifically and factually challenged in recent years -- new FCC boss Julius Genachowski says the agency will be employing the help of Harvard's Berkman Center to help verify the accuracy of broadband coverage data. According to Genachowski, the move will "help lay the foundation for enlightened, data-driven decision-making" at the agency. For an FCC that's spent a decade pretending coverage and competitive issues didn't exist in order to placate incumbent ISP lobbyists, admitting they have a problem is a positive first step for the agency.

Akamai today released their latest "State of the Internet Report," (registration annoyingly required) which covers a number of topics including broadband penetration, broadband speeds, security, and more. It's of particular interest to our readers, as the company gathers the data from clients that have hit their global content server network, offering at least a partial glimpse at useful broadband statistics.

An Akamai press release proclaims that yesterday's Michael Jackson Memorial service marked the second largest day ever (behind only the Obama inauguration) in terms of total traffic on the Akamai network, the company doling out 2,185,000 live and on-demand streams in Flash and Windows Media formats. "Total traffic on the Akamai network surpassed a rate of more than 2 terabits per second during the memorial service," says the company -- which points to a real time graphical view of streaming across the Akamai network. For those interested, Akamai's frequent State of the Internet reports make for good reading, and offer insight into global broadband speeds and trends.

According to a new survey commissioned by the Fiber To The Home Council, home sellers who have fiber to the home connections unsurprisingly have a market advantage when it comes to selling their houses. According to the survey, 82% of home buyers who've had FTTH elsewhere rank FTTH as the leading real estate amenity, a number that drops to 70% among those who've never had fiber. The complete list puts FTTH (and broadband in general) ahead of community security, fitness services, pools, golf courses or other amenities -- which aren't to be confused with necessities, like oh -- a roof that doesn't leak. "The message to the real estate market is to put a sign on the lawn and a line in your ad saying, 'This place has fiber,'" said Joe Savage, president of the Fiber-to-the-Home Council.

The latest data from the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project indicates that broadband adoption continues to surge despite the troubled economy and higher prices, as broadband becomes less of a luxury and more of a necessary utility. According to the outfit's findings, 63% of adult Americans had broadband as of April 2009, a number that's up from 55% in May 2008.

According to new data from research firm InStat, broadband-connected video game consoles remain the dominant way users consume Internet video, despite the rise in Internet-connected Blu-Ray players, media-center PCs, and media-centric cable boxes. According to the firm, revenue from Web-to-TV streaming services will grow to $2.9 billion by 2013. "Currently Web video is largely additive to traditional TV revenue streams," says Keith Nissen, In-Stat analyst. "However, ultimately web video to the TV will force a complete restructuring of today's video distribution ecosystem." While Cable operators aren't really sweating online video yet, increased deployment of next-gen broadband speeds and simpler home networked media devices should change that in time.