The Pittsburgh City Council today voted unanimously (9-0) to give Verizon a FiOS franchise in the city, after the two sides haggled over local TV funding and the installation of a small local support center. The agreement requires that Verizon deploy FiOS to the entire city within six years, though such agreements generally include plenty of wiggle room for Verizon. Efforts to include an amendment that would have Verizon funding local public access TV failed, though Verizon will have to provide a local support center.

While Verizon's been busy selling more rural, unprofitable markets, they've been on a bit of a tear lately signing citywide FiOS franchise agreements with major east coast cities, including New York City, Washington DC and Philadelphia. The push goes hand in hand with a new focus on apartment buildings, using new bendable fiber and smaller MDUs.

"I can almost guarantee you that we'll probably get better service, and you won't be stuck with such high bills," Councilwoman Tonya Payne tells Pittsburgh Post Gazette, suggesting she didn't study the issues before voting, given the telco lobbyist promise of lower prices created by TelcoTV entering a new market never seems to materialize.

In direct price to price comparisons, limited duopoly competition gives cable and phone companies the luxury of non-price competition -- which in turn allows them to raise individual service prices in concert. Still, Pittsburgh residents now get an option other than Comcast, and can either sign up for FiOS -- or threaten Comcast with cancellation in order to net lower long-term contract bundle pricing.

As we've noted countless times, Comcast had promised to have 65% of their network upgraded to DOCSIS 3.0 technology by the end of this year, and 100% of their network upgraded by the end of 2010. In addition to doubling the speeds on existing tiers, the upgrades deliver new $62.95 22Mbps/5Mbps and $99 "Extreme 50" 50Mbps/10Mbps tiers, both of which require a new DOCSIS 3.0 modem.

For years the baby bells have been trying to slow (or ignore) the death of the landline by forcing DSL customers to bundle one, whether they wanted it or not. That's why it's kind of refreshing to see this Verizon ad (pdf), forwarded to us by a reader, that actually encourages customers to drop their landline.

The past several years have seen ISPs continually expand their operations away from their core competency: running networks. AT&T is developing a three dimensional browser, Time Warner Cable/Roadrunner dabbles in used car sales, while Cox has spent the last few years exploring the real estate market.

Comcast issued their fourth quarter earnings this morning, showing that the cable giant took a slight hit from the stumbling economy. Comcast added 247,000 digital cable subscribers in Q4, down from the 530,000 added in the fourth quarter last year.

We were recently the first to report that the FCC was concerned that Comcast's new de-prioritization system would degrade competing VoIP traffic, the agency writing a letter asking Comcast to explain how this wasn't anti-competitive, and why they hadn't previously mentioned the system's impact on VoIP. The new, protocol agnostic system was deployed late last year, after our users discovered Comcast was forging TCP packets in order to slow P2P traffic for all users -- a practice that resulted in an FCC investigation, and a rather toothless "sanction."

Comcast's new system temporarily de-prioritizes the traffic for customers who meet two criteria: they're on a congested node, and they have been using 70% or more of their assigned upstream or downstream throughput for more than fifteen minutes.

If you recall, the network neutrality debate truly took off in the States back in 2005, when former SBC (now AT&T) CEO Ed Whitacre told Business Week in an article that Google wanted to use Ed's "pipes", for free. "I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it," insisted Ed at the time.

• Verizon Takes More Heat for Electrical Issues [multichannel.com]
• Britain mulls taxing Ipod users [theinquirer.net]
• Sprint takes wireless service to the max in Baltimore [usatoday.com]
• USDA announces $342 million in rural broadbvand loans [agrimarketing.com]
• Comcast Restores Service To 81% Of Houston-Area Customers [multichannel.com]
• BT's third Phorm trial starts tomorrow [theregister.co.uk]
• Ixia First to Offer 100 GE Testing Capability [techwhack.com]
• Can Browser Plug-ins Be a Business? [gigaom.com]

• Comcast: No complaints with Web traffic system [columbiatribune.com]
• GE To Merge TV/Internet In One Unit [imdb.com]
• AOL UK - Credit Crunch Causing Mass Broadband Migrations [ispreview.co.uk]
• Broadband fiber subscribers up to 3.76 million in U.S. [eetimes.com]
• Juniper Courts WiMax [lightreading.com]
• Cricket leaps in the wireless broadband market in San Antonio [bizjournals.com]
• Comcast Offers Credits To Customers Struck By Hurricane Ike [multichannel.com]
• Google phone is nice, but not a game-changer [marketwatch.com]

• Group Calls for Broadband Policy Debate Cease-fire [pcworld.com]
• Comcast COO: Local Focus Wins Battles Against Telco, DBS Competitors [multichannel.com]
• Interview with Xohm President Barry West [muniwireless.com]
• UK Broadband Migrations Rise by 8.5% Over 2007 [ispreview.co.uk]
• T-Mobile advert given thumbs up by Advertising Standards Authority [thinkbroadband.com]
• IEEE considers Gigabit speeds Wi-Fi [computerworlduk.com]
• University of Kentucky cuts all dorm landlines since nobody uses them anymore [nky.com]
• McAfee launches real-time virus killer [theinquirer.net]
• Why is Apple keeping critical QuickTime and iTunes updates on the down-low? [theregister.co.uk]

• Broadband Providers Suck. Can Google Help? [wired.com]
• U.S. Bounds Ahead on Broadband Proliferation, but it still has a long way to go [internetnews.com]
• Air Canada to offer Wi-Fi [mydesert.com]
• If Apple really wanted to revolutionize the iPod, it would embed wireless broadband [zdnet.com]
• FAU set for $173 million windfall as it leases unused broadband spectrum to Clearwire [palmbeachpost.com]
• Comcast says wireless deal could close this year [yahoo.com]
• Senator examining rising text messaging rates [620ktar.com]
• Olympics Coverage Breaks Web Records [wi-fiplanet.com]

• What’s really behind the Comcast 250 GB bandwidth cap [muniwireless.com]
• Fiber-optic Britain could cost £30bn [techradar.com]
• Will Incumbents Stifle Innovation? [gigaom.com]
• Fiber-Focused Broadband Plan Drives SureWest Growth [xchangemag.com]
• WiMax Far Ahead of LTE at Japan's NEC [pcworld.com]
• FCC Mulls Pulling Plug on Wilmington DTV Trial [multichannel.com]
• Online TV Viewing Approaches the Mainstream [Yahoo News]
• Mozilla confirms browser instability, blames Symantec for incompatibility woes [theinquirer.net]

Eddie Garcia, Vice President of Government Affairs at Comcast, has been recognized by the Hispanic community in the San Francisco Bay Area for his leadership both within the cable company and within the larger community. The award comes from the San Francisco Business Journal and the San Francisco Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. They say that Eddie is innovative, inspirational and influential in the way that he mentors and motivates Comcast employees. Of course if you want to learn more about Eddie, you can do so through Comcast. They’re going to start offering his story on Comcast On Demand (at Channel One>Bay on Demand>Public Affairs) beginning on October 15.

Comcast made headlines earlier this year when it gained Customer Number Two Million for VoIP services. The lucky woman was a Michigan resident.

Comcast made the list of bad ISPs last year which was released to let users know who was guilty of BitTorrent throttling. Comcast was guilty of preventing seeding which is an aggressive form of throttling; it’s now becoming a widespread problem amongst Comcast users.

Vonage has released their second quarter earnings, which note that while the company posted a smaller loss due to reduced marketing costs, they're no longer the largest VoIP provider. That title now belongs to Comcast, who has added some three million VoIP customers in a little over two years.

An intelligence firm by the name of OneTrak this morning emailed us this latest report exploring the impact Verizon's FiOS has had on cable and satellite operators. In particular, they focused on the 34 Massachusetts cities and towns where FiOSTV is offered.

Without officially admitting error, Qwest recently settled with Comcast over their "broadband challenge" advertising campaign that claimed the company's DSL service was faster than Comcast cable. Their ads declared that "72 percent of Internet users agreed its DSL service was as fast or faster than Comcast's broadband service."

The Qwest ads were in response to a marketing campaign Comcast started running in Qwest territory about a pair of turtles named the "Slowskys," who love DSL (and blog about it). The campaign has now been expanded with additional video and flash content that takes aim at the speed and distance limitations of DSL.

Comcast CEO Brian Roberts has consistently suggested that cable broadband is a "BMW" while DSL is a "Hyundai." You can see the service speed difference between Comcast and Qwest services in our recent speed and price report.

Comcast sells the promotional $99 triple play or $33 6Mbps/384kbps broadband in a number of more competitive markets.

The length of the promotion is usually a year before usual pricing returns, though in some markets users can now sign two-year contracts to get locked in at that price.

Users in our Comcast forum note that as of July 1, the company is now charging customers in many markets a $1.99 fee if they want to pay their bills in person. Yes, you can mail, electronically transfer your payment or even leave it in a drop box at the payment center for free -- but some people are just annoyed on principle:Resident cable technicians justify the decision by noting it's an extra expense to have an already busy human being process the payment (apparently that's not part of what you're already paying for).

Users claim that Time Warner Cable also now charges a fee to pay in person, and an Ohio TWC user tells us the company charges an extra fee if you want to pay your bill over the phone with a credit card.