There's been a flurry of rumors lately surrounding T-Mobile owner Deutsche Telekom, and their desire to improve T-Mobile's fourth-place fortunes in the U.S. wireless market. Rumors recently suggested that Deutsche Telekom wanted to buy Sprint and merge the company with T-Mobile, despite some headache-inducing technical and network integration differences. When that rumor was debunked, a new rumor surfaced saying that Deutsche Telekom wanted to partner with Clearwire, funding Clear deployment in exchange for access to spectrum. This week, insiders tell the German Handelsblatt newspaper that Deutsche Telekom is still looking for a U.S. network investment partner, and is in fact considering some kind of deal with AT&T, MetroPCS and/or Clearwire.

Telecompetitor directs our attention to a study by ABI Research that indicates that femtocell shipments this year have been well, less than impressive. The technology, which creates essentially a micro-cell tower in the home, helps with coverage issues by allowing users to make calls over their home broadband connection.

You might remember Ohio-based Buckeye Cablesystems for when they came down hard on the heads of cable modem upcappers back in 2002, going so far as to bring in the FBI to investigate users who were trying to squeeze extra bandwidth out of the cable system. It's now 2009, and Buckeye has found a much better solution for bandwidth-hungry customers -- they've started a fiber to the home trial in Toledo, but they're installing it without having to dig up any existing infrastructure thanks to a new technology by Kabel-X.

Given the high costs of deploying fiber to the home, we're starting to see new models emerge whereby if customers really want it, they can share the cost of having it installed (one Norwegian ISP gives a $400 rebate if you dig your own fiber trench). Now Utopia, the nation's largest municipal fiber deployment, is testing a new model whereby communities who want the fiber deployed can share the cost of installation. As more Utah cities look to connect to Utopia but debate how they should pay for it, Brigham City has decided that if users want fiber they can pay for it themselves. 1,600 local residents have already ponied up $3,000 a piece, helping the city install a $5.5 million network while the city itself only puts up about $700,000 of the required cost.

AT&T and Verizon's fight over 3G coverage maps just keeps rolling along, with Verizon recently running new ads that mock AT&T's wireless network, and AT&T lawyers working very hard yesterday to get those advertisements pulled by the courts. The decision to fight the ads doesn't seem to be all that wise, given the debate has simply managed to push the ads (and AT&T's recent network issues) further into the spotlight.

GigaOM directs our attention to an interesting video interview with Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who dissects Netflix's role as the premier application for broadband. Hastings discusses how the future for Netflix is bright, given the tendency to embed every consumer device with a $10 Wi-Fi chipset, and the fact that bandwidth prices continue to drop. He doesn't get into specific bandwidth costs for the Netflix streaming service, but he cites the fact that "Moore's law is an amazing thing" in a world where Amazon now charges 5 cents a gigabyte for bandwidth and you can transfer a movie for about a nickel. "What's fueling the whole system is the end users, who are paying $40-$60 to their ISP, and that's funding the whole system," says Hastings.

When last we checked in with Comcast's Internet video "TV Everywhere" initiative, it was looking more like "TV in some places, some of the time," given there were hints the service wouldn't be available to customers who weren't using a Comcast cable modem for broadband access. The idea of course is to provide existing TV customers access to free Internet video so they won't cut the cord -- but as we've explored, if the industry screw things up it could have the exact opposite effect.

Over the years we've seen no limit of specialized hardware, software or other gadgetry promising to defeat the laws of physics and speed up your Internet connection above and beyond its basic capabilities. From the "Juice Boosted" scam to Earthlink's latest absurd acceleration ploy, by and large these are all snake oil.

It has been interesting watching Blockbuster video adapt to the broadband age, with the company seemingly not trying very hard out of fear of cannibalizing their brick and mortar revenue and losing control. Early efforts to mirror Netflix's success at broadband video delivery have seemed relatively lackluster, and the company's CEO, when announcing such broadband initiatives, seems to almost expect them to fail.

Comcast is reportedly in the midst of testing femtocells, devices which essentially act as an indoor tower for wireless voice and data services -- allowing you to place calls over your home broadband connection. Comcast's investment deal with Clearwire included a provision that set aside 5 MHz of spectrum solely for WiMAX femtocells, but an anonymous source tells Fierce Wireless that deployment of the service won't happen until next year -- if it happens at all. Comcast of course offers re-branded Clearwire wireless broadband service as part of a new suite of bundles being offered in three markets so far. Ultimately, Clearwire and Comcast will likely deploy voice services over the Mobile WiMax network. Given the initial problems users are seeing with Clearwire signal, femtocells will likely be a necessary evolution.

Verizon's confirming reports from earlier this week that those who buy the new Motorola Droid this Friday will eventually have the ability to tether the phone and use it as a netbook and laptop modem. While Verizon's still not getting specific on the launch date of the functionality ("sometime in 2010"), they are getting specific on the price.

Right on the heels of last week's Clearwire Philadelphia launch, Comcast says they too have now launched their re-branded Mobile WiMax "High Speed 2 Go" service in the company's hometown of Philadelphia. Philly is Comcast's third launch market for the services, which have previously been launched in Atlanta and Portland.

According to Media Memo, Apple is pitching the idea of a new, "over the top" $30 a month subscription broadband TV service. The service, which would not be tied to Apple's Apple TV device, would simply be an extension of the iTunes video store. According to the report, Disney is one likely possible partner -- an interesting mention given they're supposedly having some trouble agreeing with cable companies over payment for their "TV Everywhere" online video initiative. Of course cable operators will fight like hell given this would be a direct competitor to both regular cable and TV Everywhere, and broadcasters may not sign up out of fear of threatening their relationships with cable companies.

As we explored last week in detail, Verizon appears to be pausing in their FiOS deployment in order to recoup some of the money in markets they've already deployed the service. One of the cities impacted by that pause is Boston, which is wondering where FiOS is given Verizon's struck citywide franchise deals with Philadelphia, New York, and Washington DC.

Torrent Freak explores how the latest version of the popular uTorrent BitTorrent client is slightly more intelligent, detecting network congestion and adjusting its behavior in order to compensate. uTP is designed to be more network friendly, measuring the time a packet takes to get from peer A to peer B, detecting problems, then throttling speed (usually upload) to help compensate. "This means that the new uTorrent will eliminate the need for ISPs to throttle BitTorrent traffic in their networks," says TorrentFreak, something we're sure BitTorrent hopes is the case, but which doesn't necessarily make it true. The uTP 2.0 beta client is currently being tested by "a couple of hundred thousand people," according to BitTorrent's VP of Product Management Simon Morris.

There's several broadband subscriber perks that have gone the way of the dodo in recent years. The most notable of course is free access to Usenet, but many ISPs have also done away with offering users free dial-up connectivity for travel or during outages. We know Cox is still offering it, but several Time Warner Cable and Road Runner customers write in to note the company this week is e-mailing its customers saying that they're no longer going to get free dial-up access starting November 30. With the availability of so much free Wi-Fi (much of it now being offered by carriers) it's apparently seen as an added, unnecessary expense. Is your ISP still offering it?

Yesterday we highlighted how a common flaw in the argument for metered billing is that it confuses pure per-byte billing with what carriers actually want to implement -- which is usually value-limited tiers with high base prices, low caps and high overage limits. The push really is all about already profitable companies looking to raise prices ahead of the Internet video explosion, something that's often disingenuously dressed up as altruism or fairness. Thankfully, we're starting to see some of our colleagues in the sector notice this, like Stacey Higginbotham over at GigaOM, who correctly observes that "when ISPs talk about meters they're talking about different service tiers that don't reflect actual usage, but herd customers into set plans where most will be paying a monthly fee for more than they use." It's a simple but important distinction.

Earlier this month we explored how despite the fact that not everybody can see it yet, Google Voice could bring significant change to the wireless industry. How? While Google Voice is the first somewhat clunky iteration of this concept, the application takes the actual calling and service mechanism out of the hands of the phone companies, and embraces the idea of everything -- voice included -- being simply data.

Previously, Google Voice required that you create a new number for use with the platform, which allows you to manage multiple numbers while offering services like voicemail transcription and free SMS. According to a post over at the Google blog, you can now use your existing number with the service, though not all functionality will work -- such as automated voicemail transcription, call recording, and different voicemail greetings for different callers. As we discussed the other day, many people don't understand yet how products like Google Voice will seriously disrupt the traditional phone empire, and leeching voicemail functionality away from the telcos continues the evolution.

While some cable operators are now running fiber to the home service, they're usually only doing it in higher-end developments where they get an easy return on their investment. One such carrier is Metrocast (see our user reviews) who've decided to deploy Motorola's fiber/coax hybrid RF over Glass (RFoG) technology -- a solution that lets cable operators use their traditional coax hardware over fiber. According to a Motorola press release, Metrocast will be deploying the technology "in select Virginia properties in specific rebuild areas." According to the Metrocast website, unless you live in one of these higher scale developments, the fastest broadband service they currently offer is 10 Mbps downstream.