Back in May of 2011 we were the first to exclusively report that AT&T would be imposing usage caps on the company's DSL and U-Verse users. Users were told DSL users would see a cap of 150 GB a month and U-Verse users would see a cap of 250 GB a month -- with both sets of users paying $10 for every additional 50 GB of data they use.

Users were given a meter to track their usage, but our users quickly pointed out that the meters weren't particularly accurate. When pressed, AT&T informed users that the company couldn't share details on how they collected data because that information was proprietary. Several years on, and only AT&T DSL users are seeing their caps enforced. Curious, I asked AT&T why and received this from an AT&T spokesman:The problem with that explanation? Numerous people who work directly on the AT&T fixed line network have told me repeatedly over the years that neither AT&T's DSL or U-Verse networks see any meaningful congestion -- and that any congestion issues (usually peak) aren't helped by monthly usage restrictions. Contrary to company narratives, imposing caps has never been about network management. Like most caps and overages applied to fixed line networks, it is about making more money while muzzling the potential threat of Internet video on TV revenues.

AT&T appears poised to begin offering new U-Verse speed tiers that should offer a belated speed increase for bandwidth-hungry users. Earlier this year AT&T promised users they'd eventually see 75-100 Mbps using line bonding, though the company was somewhat murky on deployment time -- or upstream speeds.

Despite carriers being a bit mute earlier this week with the launch of the entertainment industry's new six strikes anti-piracy initiative, each participant is slowly now outlying how their respective plans will work. Verizon throttles repeat offenders to 256 kbps.

Yesterday we noted that despite the copyright industry's new "six strikes" anti-piracy campaign launch, just one ISP had bothered to put anything about the plan on their website. AT&T sent us a statement justifying their lack of website information by saying they intend to communicate directly with impacted users.

Verizon and AT&T want to get out of maintaining or upgrading the tens of millions of DSL users so they can focus on wireless, a move that makes obvious business sense from their perspectives. Verizon Wireless isn't unionized, so Verizon gets rid of union headaches.

After several significant delays, the entertainment industry and most of the nation's largest ISPs are set to launch their "six strikes" graduated response anti-piracy efforts starting today. Sources familiar with the plan timetable have told both Daily Dot and Torrent Freak that six strikes starts today, and a new Center for Copyright Information website run by the entertainment industry appears to have been freshly launched for the occasion (see new video, below).

On the heels of new rate hikes, AT&T is informing U-Verse users that they'll also be seeing several new fees on their broadband and TV bills. Several users have told me they received no advance notice of these fees whatsoever -- they simply appeared on user bills (AT&T tells me users were notified of the price hikes in November and December).

Back in 2011 the FCC began collecting real-world user broadband data from customized routers, then issuing reports on which ISPs were failing to deliver advertised speeds. It's one of the few FCC policies in recent years that has truly paid dividends for consumers.

If you happen to live in an area that has what passes for United States broadband competition, you're probably all too aware of the massive load of junk mail you get from carriers. Here in New York, you could probably build an entire second home out of the junk mail received from Cablevision, Comcast and Verizon, as the three companies engage in bundle promotion battles.

One Consumerist reader decided to save and photograph an entire year of AT&T U-Verse junk mail, and the results are very impressive.

Where we live the variety of marketing pitches is always fun, ranging from shiny flyers to official-looking documents that proclaim to be time sensitive and require you carefully rip off each end -- only to deliver more triple play spam.

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.

It has been about half a decade now that I've been pointing out that most of the meters used by ISPs to track and bill consumers for usage aren't accurate. Customers of Canadian cable operator Cogeco have long complained the company's meter is inaccurate when users can load it at all, and every so often the meter simply goes mad -- like last Spring when the meter was horribly confused by leap year.

Over the last few years Microsoft, Comcast and Verizon have all filed patents for DVR technology that would monitor people in your living room to deliver more suitable ads. An embedded DVR camera would, for example, notice if you have a dog and then deliver more pet care product advertisements.

While AT&T is promising that 250 million potential customers will be covered by the 4G technology by the end of the year, the company remains intentionally vague about U-Verse build out goals. AT&T recently announced a significant network expansion for both U-Verse and LTE, though as we noted at the time the company used some flaky math to make the U-Verse portion of that expansion seem much larger than it actually is.

Both AT&T and Verizon are currently hanging up on tens of millions of DSL and copper POTS customers they don't want to upgrade, letting them either flee to cable competitors, or to their pricier and heavily capped LTE services. To achieve this dream however, the companies have to entirely dismantle the regulations overseeing most of these networks -- networks built with the help of tens-of-billions in taxpayer dollars and several generations of massive tax breaks (quite often with few results to show for them).

"U-verse service has been restored for the vast majority of our customers affected by the outage," AT&T tells Broadband Reports. As we've been tracking, numerous users in both the Southwest and Southeast have been without service since Monday after an AT&T DHCP server decided it had other aspirations. "We expect any remaining customer issues will be resolved this morning," says AT&T. "We will provide a credit to customers who were affected. We know our customers count on their U-verse service and we apologize for the inconvenience."

A significant chunk of AT&T U-Verse customers across a number of states continue to be unable to use broadband, voice or television services. As we noted yesterday, many of these users have been completely offline since Monday, with AT&T slow to respond to complaints or give any solid explanations as to what went wrong.

AT&T customers in our forums note that AT&T has been experiencing a service outage across numerous states. According to our users in Louisiana, Kentucky, Texas, Georgia Tennessee, Florida, and Arkansas, they have been unable to use U-Verse voice, television or Internet services -- in some cases since yesterday morning.

As we've noted, AT&T's recently announced U-Verse upgrades are less significant than the company's recent announcement made it appear, given the "expansion" involves simply pushing U-Verse out to an additional 3 million or so users they'd already intended to upgrade (the majority in San Francisco, where debates over VRAD cabinets stalled upgrades). Last week AT&T stated that some of their U-Verse expansion will also use LTE as a delivery mechanism, though the company's just not quite done working out how to do it yet:Any fixed LTE product would take the U-Verse brand and would likely look much like Verizon's Home Fusion product, which offers users an LTE connection with a roof-mounted antenna in $60 (10 GB cap), $90 (20 GB cap) and $120 (30 GB plan) flavors. AT&T conducted close to fifty different spectrum deals this year (in addition to their getting approval to use WCS spectrum for LTE, so it may take them a while to get all of their ducks in a row.

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.

AT&T told CES attendees this week that the company will soon be offering their AT&T Digital Life home security and automation service in eight unspecified markets starting in March. According to the AT&T press release, the all-digital, all wireless service allows users to manage home lighting and home security from any mobile device, be it a laptop, tablet or smartphone.