“Green” has been the buzz word in recent months for industries across the tech landscape. However, the average wireless consumer is more concerned with the dependability of networks and products than with the eco-friendly factor. Wireless companies are actively looking into ways to be greener.

Sprint Nextel has been a leader in this area, making use of wind turbine energy at its headquarters and using hydrogen fuel cells at many tower sites. AT&T and Verizon reportedly have green plans in action although the details of these projects haven’t been revealed. And smaller wireless companies are looking at ways to go green using solar and wind power.

This growth is slow in coming and it’s being driven primarily by the decreased spending cost to the companies, not by any sort of consumer demand for sustainability. Consumers will be happy to go green when there’s no risk that it will decrease the dependability of their technology.

The Legality blog has an interesting read on just how much telecom providers like AT&T could owe their customers should the lawsuit against them for illegal wiretapping be allowed to proceed. While there are more than forty potential suits currently open against Sprint, Verizon and AT&T, the EFF's case against AT&T is the most highly visible, given it involved a 22-year former employee turned whistleblower.

Given Yahoo's relative decline in stature (at least compared to Google) and AT&T's significant growth with the acquisition of BellSouth, the baby bell had been wanting to renegotiate their portal deal with the company since last year. Yesterday the two companies announced a new deal that expands the partnership somewhat. As part of the deal, the AT&T/Yahoo portal is once again getting a facelift:The two companies did not disclose the financial details of the deal, though Yahoo will have advertising access to significantly more wireless and broadband customers. With profits slipping, Yahoo yesterday announced they'd be cutting 1,000 jobs.

While AT&T this week unveiled 10Mbps U-Verse VDSL, that's likely not going to be enough to do battle with cable DOCSIS 3.0 networks over the next few years. For years AT&T has been telling us that they'll be using pair bonding to offer faster speeds.

AT&T has released their fourth quarter earnings, which show the telco earned $3.1 billion last quarter, a total that doesn't yet include BellSouth. After recent comments by the CEO that sales were down due to a slowing economy and customers not paying their bills, the company's earnings largely met investor estimates.

The phone industry recently launched a massive lobbying effort to derail wiretap reform laws that could have held them financially liable for participating in the Bush administration's warrantless wiretap program. According to the Washington Post, Democrats have now struck a deal with the Bush administration that will give the baby bells the immunity they were looking for: story continues..

We've seen advertising by major industry players get increasingly snarky as cable operators gobble up telco landline customers, and the telcos start gobbling up cable TV customers. Comcast recently had their wrist slapped for telling New England DSL customers, whom Verizon hopes to offload onto Fairpoint Communications, that they should switch to cable or face potential phone outages.

PC Magazine has an interesting look at how four wireless operators treat the new RAZR 2 differently. And by differently, we mean different software, different internal hardware, different browsers, different features crippled and different services not allowed:The carriers call this "competition." The article author says "this shows exactly what's wrong with the US market."