Last week AT&T suffered through yet another week of bad press. Comments by CEO Randall Stephenson were interpreted to mean AT&T was not only complaining about people actually using the AT&T 3G network -- but blaming consumers for AT&T's inability to prepare for iPhone bandwidth demand. AT&T's bad week (one of many this year) was punctuated late in the week by Fake Steve Jobs (writer Dan Lyons), who wrote an incredibly amusing fake conversation with AT&T CEO Randal Stephenson. In it, Mr. Jobs educates AT&T on the finer points of appreciating bandwidth-hungry iPhone users. The whole thing is chortle-inducing, but we'll trim out the bits that solely have to do with AT&T and running a network: story continues..

When you call any company for broadband customer support, there's a fairly solid chance you're entering the twilight zone. If you get a new or poorly trained support representative, the information you get is not only quite often wrong, but sometimes it's just bizarre.

For a while there, it looked like TiVo was going to change the world with a cute interface and a few beeps and boops. But as cable, phone and satellite operators started doing a better job building their own DVRs (and now networked DVRs), things started getting less certain.

Yesterday Cox announced that they were launching 50 Mbps broadband service in Las Vegas. In the announcement, local Las Vegas Cox executive Marilyn Burrows did something strange: she explained the Cox network in reasonable, realistic terms -- addressing its "non fiber" aspects and plainly exploring how DOCSIS 3.0 allows coaxial based infrastructure to achieve new heights.

Glenn Fleishman pens an interesting look at the road to gigabit Wi-Fi in a new piece this morning over at Ars Technica. Within a few years, notes Fleishman, crossing the 1 Gbps barrier at a Wi-Fi hotspot will become "routine," and Wi-Fi will replace Ethernet as the connectivity flavor du jour for most users. Assuming backhaul issues are sorted out, a new wave of multi-stream 802.11n devices is slated to deliver raw throughput of up to 600 Mbps, with three and four stream radios improving range, robustness, and throughput (albeit not always simultaneously). "The flexibility of three-stream devices should allow networks to be optimized for raw speed, speed-over-range, or range, without giving up much in the process," notes Fleishman.

For years, ISP lobbyists and their hired mouthpieces have pushed the bogus concept of the "Exaflood", or the idea that bandwidth demand is growing so quickly, ISPs can't possibly keep up unless they get X. Usually X in this equation is fewer consumer protections, no price caps, the right to charge incredibly high overage fees, not having to pay taxes -- etc.

Whether it breaks the core functionality of the Internet or not, there's very few ISPs left who aren't using DNS redirection advertising. The "service" essentially creates an entirely new revenue stream for ISPs, by presenting users with an ad-laden search portal instead of the traditional page not found error when they mistype a URL or enter a non-existent one.

ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) on Tuesday condemned the practice of redirecting Internet users to a third-party portal when they mistype, or enter a nonexistent URL. You'll recall that the practice gained international attention when Verisign implemented their heavily-loathed Sitefinder initiative in 2003.

Manassas, Virginia was the first US city to see a real, non-trial launch of broadband over powerline (BPL) technology. However, BPL has floundered the last few years because of its inherent potential for interference with amateur and emergency radio, its irrelevance in the face of next-generation speeds, and the unavoidable fact that many utilities simply didn't want to be broadband providers.

Yesterday we issued a report exploring how Verizon was again hinting at how they believed metered billing is inevitable. We also discussed how yet again, you had an ISP suggesting that a shift to metered billing was financially necessary (not true) and that the ISP desire to shift to metered billing was dictated by some kind of altruism (also not true). Apparently, this position upset Todd Spangler over at Multichannel News, who somewhere in between taking pot shots at "edgy bloggers" and "clueless" flat-rate pricing proponents arrives at his central thesis: that consumption-based billing is inevitable: story continues..

You might remember Ohio-based Buckeye Cablesystems for when they came down hard on the heads of cable modem upcappers back in 2002, going so far as to bring in the FBI to investigate users who were trying to squeeze extra bandwidth out of the cable system. It's now 2009, and Buckeye has found a much better solution for bandwidth-hungry customers -- they've started a fiber to the home trial in Toledo, but they're installing it without having to dig up any existing infrastructure thanks to a new technology by Kabel-X.

Over the years we've seen no limit of specialized hardware, software or other gadgetry promising to defeat the laws of physics and speed up your Internet connection above and beyond its basic capabilities. From the "Juice Boosted" scam to Earthlink's latest absurd acceleration ploy, by and large these are all snake oil.

Earlier this week, blogger and 25-year communications industry vet Brough Turner started a bit of a ruckus with a blog post suggesting that AT&T's wireless broadband network problems were partially AT&T's fault, and not just attributable to the massive influx of data-hungry iPhone users. Though he admittedly didn't have access to the AT&T network guts or first hand experience running a HSDPA GSM network, Turner speculated that AT&T had misconfigured their network, specifically in terms of latency and RNC buffers: story continues..

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."

A little more than a year ago, Comcast got their wrist slapped by the FCC for throttling upstream P2P traffic (and lying about it to the press and consumers), though the "sanction" contained no substantive punishment or fine. Still, Comcast has been battling the ruling ever since, arguing that the FCC's neutrality principles (pdf) don't give the FCC the authority to investigate the issue, much less sanction the company.

While some cable operators are now running fiber to the home service, they're usually only doing it in higher-end developments where they get an easy return on their investment. One such carrier is Metrocast (see our user reviews) who've decided to deploy Motorola's fiber/coax hybrid RF over Glass (RFoG) technology -- a solution that lets cable operators use their traditional coax hardware over fiber. According to a Motorola press release, Metrocast will be deploying the technology "in select Virginia properties in specific rebuild areas." According to the Metrocast website, unless you live in one of these higher scale developments, the fastest broadband service they currently offer is 10 Mbps downstream.

Proponents of White Space broadband hope to use the unlicensed and partially vacated spectrum created by the shift to digital television to create a new broadband delivery systemn (and sell hardware using this technology). A coalition of major companies, including Google, Microsoft and Dell recently conquered the objections of Dolly Parton and the broadcasting industry to get FCC approval, and are now moving forward with the technology's first tests. The first tests in the United States of the technology will take place in Claudeville, Virginia, where local schools are getting an added perk:In this instance, the technology is providing backhaul access between the Internet and the local area's Wi-Fi network. Ideally, white space broadband would be used to provide rural last mile access at lower prices.

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.

One of the talking points repeated over and over and over by carriers who oppose network neutrality is that network neutrality rules will "stifle investment" in the sector. Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg said as much yesterday, and AT&T urged their employees (via private e-mail accounts) to bombard the FCC with the talking point earlier this week.

According to a new survey from Cisco studying global broadband use, the average broadband connection generates approximately 11.4 gigabytes of Internet traffic per month. The survey included anonymous, aggregated network usage data provided by a group of more than 20 global ISPs.