Our friends over at TMONews point out that T-Mobile will be sending out an over-the-air update from Apple that will provide LTE connectivity for unlocked iPhones on T-Mobile's network starting on April 5. According to the leaked internal screenshot, the over-the-air update will also provide those users with other awaited functionality like visual voicemail and MMS. Before announcing they'd finally offer the iPhone, T-Mobile courted unlocked iPhone owners who have been looking forward to this functionality for a while. The text of the document below:

According to documents obtained by CNET, the DEA is upset because the encryption used by Apple's iMessage foils their ability to snoop on those communications. Even with a warrant (increasingly seen as optional these days by law enforcement and intelligence agencies) and the fact that carriers let the NSA snoop on everything in real time, "it is impossible to intercept iMessages between two Apple devices."

Well not entirely impossible; the memo notes that sometimes interception is possible, but it would require the government to conduct man in the middle attacks using spoofed cell towers, something the feds just got busted for using for years without properly informing Judges.

According to a new survey by the Fiber to the Home Council, running a fiber to the home network isn't just great for consumers and businesses looking for more bandwidth, but it can save a medium or small scale telco up to 20% in savings annually. "On average, respondents estimated those savings to be 20.4 percent, largely because of a decrease in ongoing repair and maintenance," says the group.

According to the Council (which is comprised of companies selling fiber gear), the number of homes that can access FTTH networks has jumped 17.6 percent over the last year to 22.7 million. Granted most small to mid-sized telcos aren't installing fiber -- not because they don't realize potential cost savings, but because they either don't have the funds to do so, or there's such pathetic competition across their footprint there's simply nothing driving them to.

Google today announced that the company is conducting a new trial of white space broadband technology in Cape Town, South Africa. The trial will use three base stations to ten local schools, in the process both proving that interference concerns have been dramatically over-stated by opponents of the technology (read: carriers, broadcasters), while also testing Google's new white spaces database. Google is one of several companies tasked with maintaining a database that will allow white space broadband powered devices to detect and avoid nearby potential unlicensed spectrum interference. Microsoft is currently conducting a similar trial in Kenya we discussed at length last month.

Ars Technica offers up an interesting read on how the folks planning the San Francisco Forty Niners new stadium claim they'll be installing a Wi-Fi network capable of connecting all 68,500 stadium attendees simultaneously -- with no bandwidth caps for anyone. The designers plan to embed access points literally everywhere, then use eight non-overlapping 20MHz channels in the 5GHz range. The designers get a little less confident when asked if all 68,500 attendees can still connect to the network if the majority of them are using 2.4GHz-only devices, but note that problem should be less of one by the time the stadium's done in 2014.

• Google Fiber could bring superfast Internet to every town in America, but for now the company is thinking small [slate.com]
• 4G Smartphone Usage Up 70% Among Small Businesses [cellphonedigest.net]
• Apple proposes 'on-the-go' wireless charging via iPad Smart Cover with built-in battery [appleinsider.com]
• Google Pulls Several Prominent Ad-Blocking Apps From Play Store For Violating Developer Distribution Agreement [techcrunch.com]
• FinSpy Software Used To Surveil Activists Around The World [huffingtonpost.com]
• With User Profiles Still In Testing, Netflix’s Social Sharing Feature Makes No Sense [techcrunch.com]
• Blue Coat, Skype and QQ named despots' best friends - Reporters Without Borders slams "enemies of the internet" [theregister.co.uk]
• What's most important? Bandwidth over kilo-miles, or milli-watts? IBM, AT&T brainboxes beg to differ [theregister.co.uk]
• Rumor Mill: T-Mobile to launch handset trade-in program in shift to Value plans [fiercewireless.com]
• Networking Battles to Run the World [nytimes.com]
• Google Hastens to Show Its Concern for Privacy [nytimes.com]

*For more interesting links to broadband and related tech news from DSLReports.com & other sites throughout the day, follow me on Twitter @ChrisBBReports!*

If you live in the United States, you may be familiar with the common sentiment that you generally cannot take your favorite cellular enabled device (tablet, smartphone, Sony PlayStation Vita, etc.) and use it on any carrier you like. With GSM carriers, this is referred to as a SIM lock.

Despite the faster speeds now being pushed through fiber and DOCSIS 3.0, there's many users who continue to suffer from the inability to quickly and consistently stream YouTube videos. Spend a few minutes in any of our forums and you'll find this is a universal problem with many carriers, including AT&T U-Verse, Verizon FiOS and Time Warner Cable.

In late January, unlocking your cellphone technically became illegal after the Librarian of Congress removed it from the DMCA exception list last year. Technically it remains legal for you to jailbreak your phone, but it isn't legal to unlock your phone unless you get your carrier's permission first. If you think that sounds idiotic you're not alone; a petition was formed on the White House website aimed at making unlocking cell phones legal again, and as of this week it received the 100,000 signatures necessary to get a mandatory White House response. Of course as Mike Masnick at Techdirt notes, the White House can respond by pointing two the idiotic exemption process and urging people to wait three years for new exemptions.

A Comcast insider has provided me with documentation stating Comcast is going to start charging XFINITY Voice users for device backup batteries. The documentation suggests that the new policy will go into effect starting February 26.

ISPs which in the past had historically improved in Netflix performance because of faster speeds, are now finding themselves falling in Netflix's new monthly streaming ISP rankings because they're not signing up for Netflix's CDN network. As noted recently, Netflix stated they'd start offering users "Super HD" and 3D streams -- if their ISP signed up for Netflix's new Open Connect Content Delivery Network.

• Fiber to drive global broadband revenue growth to 2018 [telecoms.com]
• No cash for broadband: Europe's super-fast future torpedoed by budget cuts [zdnet.com]
• Hold off updating your iPhone 4S to iOS 6.1, European carriers warn customers [gigaom.com]
• AT&T: We didn't execute well on T-Mobile deal [fiercewireless.com]
• United Airlines adds Wi-Fi for overseas flights [latimes.com]
• Cellular carriers seek smooth handoffs from LTE to 3G [pcworld.com]
• Google: Self-driving cars in 3-5 years. Feds: Not so fast [extremetech.com]
• At least two-thirds mobile traffic will be video by 2017, Total mobe data shifted doubled during 2012 - Cisco report [theregister.co.uk]
• IP Address Snapshots Not Sufficient Evidence To File Infringement Suit; Prenda Lawyer Faces Sanctions [techdirt.com]
• NTIA will hand out $121.5M to aid FirstNet effort [fiercebroadbandwireless.com]
• Vehicles and mobility are converging but fragmentation, lack of standards may hinder progress [fiercewireless.com]

*For more interesting links to broadband and related tech news from DSLReports.com & other sites throughout the day, follow me on Twitter @ChrisBBReports!*

High prices, limited competition, inaccurate meters, below the line predatory fees, inaccurate government broadband mapping data -- there's a long laundry list of things that could use fixing in the current U.S. broadband and television landscape.

The FCC met with representatives from ISPs and carriers, city governments and power utilities to see what, if anything, could have prevented some of the outages seen during superstorm Sandy last fall. As I noted at the time, the response from fixed-line broadband providers was fairly stellar, with most ISPs providing quick refunds.

DNSSEC is a flavor of security that allows both sites and providers to validate domain names to make sure they're correct and not tampered with, and is supposed to help combat things like DNS cache "poisoning" and phishing scams. While some ISPs like Comcast have made great efforts to get DNSSEC deployed, most ISPs and companies are lagging far behind.

Belkin this week announced that the company will be buying Linksys from Cisco for an undisclosed price. The deal will give Belkin an estimated 30% share of home and small business networking market in the United States, and signals the end of Cisco's experiments in the residential networking market. Cisco paid $500 million for Linksys in 2003, and was expected to receive much less than that from a sale. "Linksys has long been an important member of the Cisco family and we are confident that we have found the best buyer in Belkin," Cisco stated in a blog post.

One of the UK’s biggest ISPs – Sky – has admitted that poor capacity planning is to blame for the severe speed degradation customers in some areas have suffered in the past few months. The Murdoch-owned communications giant acknowledged this week that the severe slowdowns plaguing the ISP have been the result of "a combination of an underlining increase in network traffic as well as an especially high rate of new customer additions.”

Sky, which has around four million broadband customers, was quick to emphasise that only customers in Doncaster, North Wales and Bristol have had problems.

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.

Security analyst Gaurang Pandya this week proclaimed that Nokia has been hijacking Internet traffic of Nokia phone users, technically providing the company with access to all user Internet browsing activity. According to the researcher, Nokia is effectively conducting a "man in the middle attack" on its users, intercepting and temporarily decrypting HTTPS connections, giving Nokia access to all manner of protected communications.

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.