• Philly to buy EarthLink’s wireless network that was meant for citywide Wi-Fi [Philadelphia Busines Journal]
• How About a Data Plan With That Car? [gigaom.com]
• Verizon Offers Customer Support Via TV [cable360.net]
• Aussie Web filter will compromise national broadband network, say providers [news.com.au]
• Cox's Bye dishes on LTE, 700 MHz and bundling wireless [fiercewireless.com]
• Continental to offer Wi-Fi on 21 aircraft [sun-sentinel.com]
• New Zealand Brings Back Three Strikes... With Some Oversight [techdirt.com]
• Genachowski Urges Industry To Volunteer Low-Cost Broadband [multichannel.com]
• "World's worst" spammer in court [theinquirer.net]
• Firefox update plugs three critical flaws [theregister.co.uk]

According to the Wall Street Journal, McDonald's will be offering free Wi-Fi service to everyone -- starting in January. The fine dining establishment has traditionally charged customers $2.95 for two hours of Internet access at 11,000 of its 14,000 U.S.

With just 63 days left to go before the FCC unveils the nation's first ever broadband plan, the FCC this morning shared the plan's basic structure with the press and public. According to a press announcement (pdf), the plan will focus on reforming the USF, fostering more ISP transparency, address spectrum issues, exploring accessibility for those with disabilities and pushing for the creation of a national wireless broadband network.

Small Texas broadband operator GVTC Communications says they're bringing 40 Mbps downstream and 10 Mbps fiber to the home service to portions of Texas. According to the company's press release (pdf), the new service costs $89.95 -- if you bundle it with other GVTC services. GVTC is competing locally with AT&T's U-Verse (with top speeds of 24 Mbps) and Time Warner Cable -- who have yet to deploy faster DOCSIS 3.0 services to anywhere other than portions of New York City. According to GVTC, the company's spending $35 million to extend fiber to 80% of their customers across Far North San Antonio, Boerne, Bulverde and other Hill Country and Southeast Texas communities.

Bend, Oregon based BendBroadband isn't particularly well known, with just a handful of reviews in our database. But the carrier got a big spurt of attention last year when they decided to be one of the first US ISPs to implement monthly caps between 10-50GB, and charge $1.50 per additional gigabyte consumed -- something Time Warner Cable tried to do and was smacked on the nose for it by consumers.

Earlier this week "fake Steve Jobs" (Newsweek journalist Dan Lyons) wrote a satirical tirade against AT&T, lamenting the company's inability to adequately address iPhone bandwidth demand, and their recent comments suggesting they might impose new metered charges for iPhone users. In response, Lyons urged readers to use as much bandwidth as possible this Friday in protest against AT&T's failure to understand that people using your product is a good thing.

While some had hoped that the new Obama administration would bring with it a little more government responsibility in terms of allowing corporations to fully dictate technology policy, there's no bigger example to the contrary than this week's anti-piracy summit being coordinated by Vice President Joe Biden. As Techdirt notes, the invite to Biden's summit at the White House proudly proclaims (pdf) that the event is designed to "bring together all of the stakeholders." Yet in examining those invited to attend, the list is comprised entirely of entertainment industry executives.

Project Honeypot says they've just received their one billionth spam message: an IRS phishing scam sent to an e-mail address harvested nearly two years ago. The project started in 2004, and includes tens of thousands of network admins from over 170 countries who spend their time tracking online fraud. According to the project announcement, they estimate that for every e-mail Project Honeypot gets, the same message goes out to 125,000 real victims. As such, 125 trillion spam messages have been sent to users since the project began tracking. To celebrate the milestone, they've authored an interesting report exploring in-depth spam and scam statistics including where they come from and who they're targeting.

ViaSat says they've completed the acquisition of satellite broadband provider WildBlue, and is now moving forward in the process of integrating ViaSat's ground network technology with WildBlue’s operational and distribution platform. "The WildBlue acquisition advances our entry into the Ka-band broadband service business by over a year and more completely establishes the financial and strategic framework to capture the value anticipated from the ViaSat-1 satellite," says ViaSat CEO Mark Dankberg. ViaSat says they'll launch a new satellite in 2011 that offers more capacity than "all current North American satellites combined." That's good news for WildBlue, who not only imposes incredibly low usage caps on consumers -- but hasn't even had the capacity to expand their customer base.

• Worldwide Broadband ISP Subscribers Top 451 Million in Q3 2009 [ispreview.co.uk]
• ViaSat Completes WildBlue Acquisition [satellitetoday.com]
• McDonalds to offer free unlimited WiFi starting in January [chicagotribune.com]
• Intel heaps 'connected-TV' hype on partners [theregister.co.uk]
• Mysterious company sues Apple, IBM, Microsoft, Adobe, Oracle, IBM, Sony, many others; says Software installation? We own it! [theregister.co.uk]
• Scammers exploit Google Doodle to spread malware [cnet.com]
• San Francisco to be first city in US to require radiation labels for cell phones? [cellular-news.com]
• Open Innovation Gets a FAIL with Mobile Developers [wipjam.com]

• UK provider O2 trials 150Mbps LTE mobile broadband [broadband-finder.co.uk]
• AT&T Offers New Position on Net Neutrality [cio.com]
• Next gen mobile devices could mess with TV reception? [broadbandgenie.co.uk]
• Biden Convenes 'Piracy Summit' That Appears To Be Entirely One-Sided [techdirt.com]
• Comcast Keeps 'Beta' Tag On Online TV Service [multichannel.com]
• Sony Playstation network wants original, HBO-like content [theregister.co.uk]
• Googlephone specs uncovered; launch date outed? [reghardware.co.uk]
• Microsoft Caught Copying Software Code In China [techdirt.com]

Back in July, shortly after calling Cablevision's free Wi-Fi a "marketing stunt," Verizon began offering select broadband customers free Wi-Fi. As noted at the time, the service wasn't extended to Verizon Wireless users or base package DSL users, required a third party application that only works on Windows, and wasn't usable on home PCs (netbook/laptops only).

It's fairly common practice for cable carriers to blame their often bi-annual TV rate increases on the high costs they incur from broadcasters. While content (especially sports programming) certainly is expensive, cable operators share responsibility for the continually increasing rates.

As expected, Comcast has nationally launched the beta of their new Internet video implementation of "TV Everywhere." Dubbed Xfinity, the service offers Comcast cable TV customers access to Internet video content at no additional charge. Interested Comcast users will need to head to either the Comcast.net or Fancast portals and download a movie player created by Move Networks.

Last week you'll recall that the cable industry's chief lobbying and policy group, the NCTA, unveiled a new talking point suggesting that network neutrality protections would violate the cable industry's First Amendment rights. It's a weird and incoherent argument for anybody who has actually bothered to read the First Amendment.

The Australian government has been sinking millions of dollars into ISP Internet filters, conducting trials with a handful of ISPs, many of whom have been very vocal in their beliefs that the filters won't technically work. Australian political leaders in favor of the filters don't seem to care -- the government admitting the ongoing trials have no quantifiable metric to determine whether the trials were a success or failure.

Fresh off of their attempt to capture the residential broadband speed crown by offering 105 Mbps service, cable operator Mediacom last week officially announced they'd be migrating to a new e-mail system. Judging from posts to our Mediacom forum the launch didn't go particularly smoothly.

Back in August, cable provider Suddenlink expanded their deployment of faster DOCSIS 3.0 service in select portions of Texas. At the time, the service clocked in at 20 Mbps downstream and 1 Mbps upstream -- far below DOCSIS 3.0's maximum capability.

• Telcos See Profitability of Open Mobile Internet Access As Biggest Challenge [cellular-news.com]
• Australia pushes ahead with controversial Internet filter [totaltele.com]
• FCC rules could counter freedom of speech [washingtontimes.com]
• Is Bandwidth.com the Future of VoIP and Voice? [gigaom.com]
• Is the UK Government trying to hide the broadband tax? [pcpro.co.uk]
• Smartphones Driving Adoption of Mobile TV [cellular-news.com]
• Class Action: MetroPCS's Unlimited International Calling Is Anything But [cellular-news.com]
• Broadcasters Must Be Part of Broadband Ecosystem [multichannel.com]

• Broadband Stimulus Could Require OSS Standardization [xchangemag.com]
• Operators must change data pricing structure at some point [fiercewireless.com]
• Verizon dismissess DirecTV acquisition chatter [fierceiptv.com]
• Report: AT&T Reputation Tarnished by iPhone Flaws [pcworld.com]
• Artists: Don't Expect To Get Paid For What Imeem & Snocap Owe You [techdirt.com]
• 400,000 low-income Parisians to get FTTH [muniwireless.com]
• AT&T Has Agreements Covering 97% Of Wireline Union Workers [multichannel.com]
• Google's reCAPTCHA busted by new attack [theregister.co.uk]