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.

The country of Finland recently declared they were making broadband a legal right, requiring that all 5.3 million of the country's residents be served by 1 Mbps service by next summer, and 100 Mbps service by 2015. That's a little easier to do in a country like Finland, which has just 5.3 million residents to our 300+ million, and doesn't have to deal with things like, well, Montana.

Last year Canadian incumbent Bell Canada throttled the bandwidth of wholesale competitors, so they couldn't offer unthrottled services that were better than Bell's own, throttled DSL service. The company then started pushing for usage-based billing (UBB) for wholesalers, meaning competitors would now be paying for bandwidth on both ends (smaller Canadian ISPs lament this as double dipping and a tactic designed to drive them out of business). Bell Canada has justified the moves by saying they're financially necessary in order to fund network expansion. However, BCE's earnings this week indicate the company's profit more than doubled. Why was usage-based billing necessary again? Surely someday, somebody is going to notice that the North American ISPs who claim expensive new metering models are financially necessary are never able to prove it.

Jeffrey M. O'Brien over at Fortune is the latest American with a sluggish DSL connection to suffer from Asian broadband envy, noting that Hong Kong provider City Telecom offers symmetrical 100 Mbps broadband service for about $13 a month.

In 2007, UK telco British Telecom called running fiber to the home "premature," instead opting to milk copper for a little longer. In 2008, they announced a widely lauded plan to invest in "fiber" (to the node), though the specifics weren't particularly impressive when you looked a little closer, and the "fiber to the press release" announcement was more about getting a regulatory back rub from the British Government.

The entertainment industry would really like ISPs to play content police, booting P2P users from their networks. But given ISPs don't want to take on the added expense and liability for an effort that might not work anyway, the entertainment industry will try to pass laws forcing them to.

Remember the ACTA? The international anti-piracy agreement being hashed out in private between governments and the entertainment industry? The one the EFF sued to try and get information about but the Obama Administration classified as a state secret? Canadian Law Professor Michael Geist says bits and pieces are leaking out, and the law does indeed revolve around forcing ISPs into the role of Internet copyright nannies -- an expensive and likely futile endeavor. According to the EFF, the ACTA is everything they feared it would be: story continues..

A new report by Infonetics Research indicates that VoIP service generated a whopping $21 billion for global service providers during the first half of 2009. The majority of that revenue came from residential VoIP service, and as most of you are aware, the majority (more than 90%) of the residential VoIP industry is now dominated by the biggest cable TV operators.

The CRTC earlier this year couldn't be bothered to come to the defense of independent ISPs facing extinction due to Bell Canada's sudden throttling efforts, but the regulatory agency amazingly came alive this week to stop the entry of a new wireless phone competitor in Canada. A CRTC ruling has banned Globalive, a new entrant into the Canadian market, from doing business in Canada.

According to Australia's Computer World, the FCC's Susan Crawford has been meeting with Australia's phone industry lobbyists to closer examine that country's plan to build a national fiber network. Back in April, Australia announced plans to build a A$43 billion ($31 billion) network under the banner of a new private/public company -- with the government selling their stake after five years. Such a plan would obviously be considerably more expensive here in the States, and would face relentless opposition from the biggest carriers. Hopefully the FCC won't be following Australia's expensive and likely futile effort to clean the Internet of all its naughty bits. The FCC's broadband plan is scheduled to drop in 111 days.

ISPs aren't the only ones against the UK's new plan to kick repeat offenders off of the Internet. Techdirt notes that Britain's law enforcement and intelligence agencies are coming out against the proposed "three strikes" idea, arguing that it would make tracking criminals more difficult.

In the past few weeks, two different Internet traffic studies from Cisco and Arbor networks have indicated that P2P's overall Internet capacity consumption is down. Or more accurately, that P2P's slice of the Internet capacity pie is starting to be dwarved by quickly growing video consumption. Cisco's study (which we covered yesterday) pretty clearly indicates this relativity, but Arbor's indicated that P2P traffic had "declined dramatically, leading to reports that P2P was "dying." Of course GigaOM (via Techdirt) notes this relativity, but there's something else in the piece that seems more pertinent:In other words, Arbor indicates that as ISPs crack down harder on P2P use, more P2P users are using encryption and as such can't be tracked. That would seem to suggest the numbers may not only be relative -- they may be completely wrong.

According to a new survey from Cisco studying global broadband use, the average broadband connection generates approximately 11.4 gigabytes of Internet traffic per month. The survey included anonymous, aggregated network usage data provided by a group of more than 20 global ISPs.

Last week an FCC-commissioned report confirmed what most everybody but the FCC already knew thanks to countless other studies -- that United States broadband is a middle of the road performer, in part thanks to having no real broadband plan. Canadians are now taking note of the study as well, as it highlighted how Canada is lagging behind other industrialized countries in broadband speed, price and coverage. Of course none of this is particularly surprising when you note how Canada seems to have been mirroring the last decade of U.S. broadband policy -- which basically consists of a well-lobbied regulator doing whatever the wealthiest carriers tells them to do.

In the UK, the government is still working toward the entertainment industry's goal of booting heavy P2P users off of the Internet, should they be caught transferring pirated material three times. As we've covered at length, this is a bad idea for a number of reasons.

Back in 2004, Intel was busy hyping WiMax as "the most important thing since the Internet itself," and blogs and technology analysts were prematurely proclaiming the wireless technology a third pipe competitor to DSL and cable. At the time we tried to temper some of that enthusiasm, noting that WiMax most likely would be a niche player in a very big pond.

Here in the States we only just decided, nearly a decade after the industry took off, that it might be smart to have some kind of national broadband plan. We have also decided, after a decade of using bad science to inform any telecom policy we did make, that using real science instead of lobbyist spreadsheets might be a good way to proceed. We've also concluded that instead of guessing who has broadband, actually mapping availability might be a good idea. Of course in terms of how to improve broadband, we're still hashing out the details.

Further squashing rumors that Deutsche Telekom is interested in buying Sprint and merging it with T-Mobile (ignoring the resulting technical nightmare), Deutsche Telekom Chief Financial Officer Timotheus Hoettges says there's no need for further consolidation in the U.S. wireless market.

For those who continue to believe that Wi-Fi signals either make them sick or contain secret messages from aliens, the BBC notes that evolutions in wireless-signal blocking paint now allow the paint to absorb frequencies transmitting at 100GHz. The paint developers are marketing the paint to the security conscious or theaters eager to shut up cell phone chatter. Next up? Wi-Fi blocking clothes. "We're assuming that excessive exposure could be bad for us," says creator Shin-ichi Ohkoshi. "Therefore we're trying to make protective clothes for young children or pregnant women to help protect their bodies from such waves."

A few years ago, you'd be hard pressed to find a Canadian who knew what network neutrality was, despite the fact we've been debating about the idea here in the States since around 2005. The only reason Canadians hadn't been made aware of the issue is they weren't being shown clear examples of potential violations, like when AT&T CEO "Big Ed" Whitacre began mumbling about "free rides," Clearwire blocked VoIP traffic completely on their network, or Comcast began throttling upstream P2P services for all users regardless of congestion.