The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has once again released their broadband statistics for OECD member countries. The OECD's broadband portal offers statistics that are current up to December 2007 -- the latest data showing we're tops in total broadband subscribers (69.9 million), but still fifteenth in penetration per 100 inhabitants (23%) and 22nd in average monthly subscription price.

The latest data shows that the U.S.'s broadband penetration rate (subscriptions per 100 inhabitants) now sits at 23%, up from 5.49% back in 2002. While 23% is higher than the OECD average (20%), it still places the U.S. in fifteenth place overall, behind countries such as Canada (27%), Finland (31%) and Denmark (35%).

Broadband prices are another area where the United States lags its OECD counterparts, the U.S. coming in at 11th in terms of cost per MB, and 22nd in monthly subscription price. As of October 2007, the average price of a broadband connection in the U.S.

CNET's Declan McCullagh e-mails me his latest piece, which suggests that ISPs who monitor and sell their customer browsing data could be running afoul of decades-old wiretapping laws. While I've been writing about behavioral advertising for a while, Charter's announcement last week of their decision to use NebuAD technology was the first glimpse many had of the concept.

When comparing Sprint and Verizon's EVDO service, Verizon usually came up short, given their 5GB monthly cap, and terms of service that restricts everything but browsing and e-mail. However, with Sprint suffering through a rocky financial stretch, it looks like their CEO has decided that customers were getting too much, for too little.

Netflix's broadband delivery system is nice idea, but until now, you were restricted to watching titles on your PC screen. I'm not sure about you, but watching movies at my desk is about as enjoyable as taking a bath in the kitchen sink. To cure this, Netflix has released the $99 Netflix Player by Roku, which offers unlimited streaming of 10,000 Netflix titles, assuming you're on a Netflix subscription plan of $8.95 or above. There's no HD yet, but it's coming down the road. See reviews at CNET and Wired.

• Napster launches world's biggest online music store [T3.com]
• Prices of DSL services go up…and down [TechWack.com]
• Superfast broadband in the UK: the realistic picture [PCW.co.uk]
• Mobile broadband to drive $850m investment in FMG and 4G [ComputerWeekly.com]
• Thanks to Cable, VoIP in the U.S. Is Booming [GigaOm.com]
• Whatever happened to... Three Strikes? [The Register]
• Demand for wireless Internet paying off for schools [LATimes.com]
• Mass website hacks here to stay [Vnunet.com]

• In the Red? Sprint Says Gouge the Customers [GigaOm]
• LTE must motor to catch WiMax [Electronicsweekly.com]
• Zango dismisses Storm Worm conspiracy theory [The Register]
• Muni Wi-Fi Deathwatch Heralds Wide-Area Wireless Rebirth [InformationWeek.com]
• Mozilla phancies doing a Phorm [The Register]
• How SF and other cities could have created citywide Wi-Fi access: the easy way [MuniWireless.com]
• Broadband Wireless Femtocells Too Expense to Compete with Wi-Fi [Broadband Wireless Exchange Magazine]
• UN telecommunication official warns of widening Internet broadband divide [UN.org]

Comcast over the weekend announced that they've struck a deal to buy Cable Modem Termination System (CMTS) gear from Arris Group, as the cable giant speeds up their DOCSIS 3.0 plans. Last month, Comcast launched their first pre-certification DOCSIS 3.0 market, offering $150, 50Mbps/5Mbps service in the twin cities of Minneapolis and St.

Though I've been unable to get official launch plans out of AT&T yet, our users are reporting that the telco is now offering dual-HD streams in a number of U-Verse markets. After seeing an initial launch in the St. Louis area, users in parts of Michigan and Georgia are also seeing the update. Providing dual HD streams is an important competitive milestone, because until users can record two HD streams at once, U-Verse TV simply isn't on par with cable & satellite HD. AT&T has been busy trying to fit 10Mbps VDSL data service, two HD channels, and two SD channels into the 25Mbps pipe most users (around 3k feet from the DSLAM) see.

Remember Sprint Broadband Direct? Sprint is e-mailing the remaining customers of their line-of-sight-based wireless broadband service to inform them that they'll be terminating the service starting July 31. Made painfully irrelevant by the combination of Sprint EVDO and WiMAX, the 1.5Mbps service, which required a 13.5" diamond-shaped dish, saw mixed reviews over the years from our users.

A user at the Cable Rant forums (via Wi-Fi Networking News) notes that Cablevision's Wi-Fi installation is well underway, and takes some photos of the BelAir gear being used by the NY-Metro area cable operator. The company is deploying BelAir 100S Strand Mounted Wireless Multi-service Nodes and Cisco Aironet 1500 Series mesh access points on utility poles.

Cablevision announced they'd be offering free Wi-Fi service to all of their customers last week, and stated the deployment would cost about $100 per user (they have 3.1 million cable customers). I'll note that non-customers can also pay Cablevision for service, though they've yet to reveal pricing.

Sandvine Corporation, whose traffic shaping hardware sits at the heart of the current Comcast P2P throttling controversy, was considered one of the tech-sector's hottest companies just last year. With their gear at the center of renewed network neutrality discussions, combined with the credit crunch and slowed earnings, the company's stock has taken a serious beating. With Comcast moving to a "protocol agnostic" solution (aka caps and over-use fees), Sandvine is offering new "protocol agnostic" service (aka "Fairshare") to try and keep pace.The press release offers virtually no substantive technical information, so I'm trying to dig up more. "Protocol agnostic" is certainly the new buzz phrase among traffic shaping companies as they attempt to woo cable carriers, who are in turn trying to appease the FCC.

Last week, I noted that Canadian regulator the CRTC denied immediate relief for independent ISPs that were angry with Bell Canada's traffic shaping. As a sign that they might not be as big of a pushover as I had presumed, they're now asking Bell Canada to prove that congestion makes these steps necessary.

heels_fan writes in with this Associated Press report discussing how two Congressmen have asked Charter to delay their sale of user browsing data to NebuAD. Reps. Edward Markey, D-Mass., and Joe Barton, R-Texas, have sent letters to Charter CEO Neil Smit, urging that the tracking plan be put on hold until the lawmakers can speak with Smit about it.

• Report: Broadband in America [PCMag.com]
• Qwest seeks more money from feds for rural service [Denver Business Journal]
• Southwest to test Wi-Fi on planes [Nashville Business Journal]
• Wireless Industry Satisfaction Scores Lowest Since ‘05 [Cellphones.ca]
• Structural separation needed to create broadband competition [MuniWireless.com]
• AOL seeks growth in shift from mass site to niches [Yahoo News]
• Can Microsoft Survive the Internet? [Technocrat.net]
• VeriSign will not revive Site Finder despite patent [ZDNet UK]

A security conference held this week brought up information from studies that indicate it’s really easy to hack into other people’s phone calls. The studies show that cell phones using GSM technology as well as most VoIP systems have security flaws which make it affordable and simple for someone to listen in on your calls as well as to track your location through the phone.

Cable companies are hopeful that the forced transition from analog to digital television is going to cause a big boost in profits. Although they already offer digital service to their existing customers, they are hoping to be able to attract the new and lapsed customers who may be without service as a result of the change. There are eight million potential customers in the areas served by Comcast so the company is making targeted marketing efforts intended to get their attention. Analysts say that this could help cable do well despite the economy being in a recessionary period.

In an effort to maximize profits in an area of business where it seems to be doing well, Qualcomm entered the bidding process last month for spectrum in the UK that could be used to develop mobile TV abroad. Bidding was successful; Qualcomm gained 40MHz of the L-band spectrum that it was seeking.

People with unlocked iPhone and iPod Touch gadgets are happy to find that they can now share music and media files through a new application. Songs can be downloaded via a p2p network with the average Wi-Fi download speed being approximately three minutes. Movie downloads are taking a little over an hour on the average iPhone using this new application. Download speeds are about twice as fast for those people using the AT&T EDGE network rather than a standard Wi-Fi connection. The application is still in beta, the speeds aren't good enough for most people and there are apparently some bugs to work out but people who love their iPhones feel that this is a step in the right direction for media sharing.

Much of the entertainment industry has it in for the big BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay. A man dubbed The Web Sheriff has been working with has-been music artists on developing a copyright infringement lawsuit against The Pirate Bay.

As cities across the nation from Portland to Philadelphia struggle with the question of what to do with their stalled wireless networks, San Francisco is slowly plodding away at becoming a Wi-Fi city. San Francisco was originally planning to be one of the first large cities to get a citywide network but early on it identified problems akin to those that played out in other cities and determined to find a more practical way to create the network.