According to Verizon filings with the SEC, their acquisition of Alltel will close on January 9. Verizon will pay .9 billion and acquire .2 billion in Alltel debt, but will be acquiring about 13 million customers — creating the largest wireless phone company in the country, with 83 million customers (AT&T has 74.9 million, Sprint has 50.5 million, and T-Mobile has 32.1 million). Verizon has stated they will retain some call center positions after the acquisition, but many redundant positions at Alltel will be eliminated.
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User uid://1118311 submits this Torrent Freak report, which profiles a new startup named Spotify, a product from the developer of uTorrent. According to TorrentFreak, Spotify was created by some of the money made when uTorrent was sold to BitTorrent — the idea being to create a competitor to piracy. The service streams 160kbps quality MP3s immediately from a huge catalog of major label music, in part using P2P technology. From creator Andres Sehr:

The service doesn’t work with iPods or other media players, which doesn’t strike us as much of a piracy alternative, though the social music-sharing aspects of the service look promising. Since it was in closed beta in the U.S., some users note you may be able to successfully sign up if using a UK proxy server.
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The Chicago Tribune is eagerly awaiting the arrival of Sprint and Clearwire’s Mobile WiMax offering, citing a mid-to-late 2009 launch date for “Clear” in the windy city. That’s a shift from repeated reports that both Chicago and Washington DC would go live shortly after the launch of XOHM in Baltimore. “Clear” and “XOHM” will ultimately become one product as part of Sprint and Clearwire’s joint venture, which aims to reach 140 million people within thirty months. The completion of the network will be greatly aided by a .2 billion cash infusion from Comcast (.05 billion), Intel ( billion), Time Warner Cable (0 million), Google (0 million), and Bright House Networks (0 million.)
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Timothy Butler of Open For Business e-mails us to note he’s done a little digging, and found that AT&T has been downgrading its EDGE/2G service to the weaker 1900 MHz band. While 3G/HSDPA customers won’t care, EDGE/2G was previously using the 850 MHz band, which provided better coverage, particularly indoors. Sure, upgrading your network to faster speeds is great, but there’s still a lot of traditional 2G/EDGE customers under long-term contract out there (including first gen iPhone, RAZR and Blackberry users) who may find they’re now seeing slightly less robust coverage. AT&T’s solution, of course, is to push customers toward newer gear that supports HSDPA.

Update: An AT&T tech writes in with his thoughts:

Update 2:Author Timothy Butler responds:

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Back in 2007, the government announced it would be giving each household in the United States two coupons to help pay for digital adapters, made necessary by the February 17, 2009 transition from analog to digital television. According to the Associated Press, there’s still millions of households unprepared for the shift, yet the program funding these subsidies is almost out of cash. The NTIA had a .34 billion funding ceiling for the program, and is now saying that unless they get more cash, they’ll have to start putting consumers on a waiting list.

Anybody willing to bail out the government’s digital conversion program?
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US Appeals Court Wary Of Co’s Suit Vs FCC Over Free Internet Nasdaq.com
VzW Asked to Pull Push-to-Talk Ad xchangemag.com
Verizon FiOS, AT&T U-verse lead latest Consumer Reports survey consumeraffairs.com
Clearwire Simplifies Mobile Broadband Usability xchangemag.com
Atlantic Metro Communications, Rainbow Broadband partner in NYC lighwave.com
Half of all Brits think their Broadband is too Expensive ispreview.co.uk
NTT Talks IPv6 TV at CES lightreading.com
Year of opportunity for O2 and Sky? samknows.com
Microsoft made .5 billion from Vista incapable PCs theinquirer.net
FiOS Offers HD Six-Month Freebies multichannel.com
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Sanford Bernstein analyst Craig Moffett, who has recently shown he’s no fan of network upgrades in general and Verizon FiOS specifically, single-handedly sent AT&T and Verizon stocks tumbling today by proclaiming that Wall Street was overestimating the ability of AT&T and Verizon to weather a steep recession. “AT&T and Verizon may indeed be somewhat more recession-resistant than most businesses,” Moffett wrote in a sixty page note to clients. “But we believe they are nevertheless much more cyclically exposed than consensus estimates (and valuations) would suggest.”
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Rumors of AT&T finally allowing the iPhone to be tethered and used as an HSDPA modem have been bubbling for a while, and now it appears the rumor is at full boil. The Unofficial Apple Weblog is reporting that the functionality may be announced at this week’s MacWorld event. Earlier rumors suggested that tethering would cost customers a month on top of your existing voice and data plan, in addition to the 5GB per month consumption cap and overage charges.
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In line with their traffic management website Comcast has confirmed to us they’ve installed their new broadband throttling system across all markets. The system, which we first profiled back in September, throttles a user’s connection if a particular CMTS port is congested, and if that user has been identified as a primary reason why. This two-condition throttling system replaces Comcast’s old, FCC-criticized system of using forged TCP packets to throttle upstream P2P services for all users, regardless of consumption.

According to Comcast’s filings (pdf) with the FCC, they’ve deployed new hardware and software close to the company’s Regional Network Routers (RNRs). This hardware will flip a user from the standard “Priority Best-Effort” traffic (PBE) to lower quality of service (QoS) “Best-Effort” traffic (BE) for fifteen minutes if they’re a major reason congestion exists.

While certainly a slightly more transparent system to those paying attention, the new system is probably going to confuse the American public, many of whom don’t even know what a gigabyte is. Comcast used a bus metaphor to explain the difference between best effort and priority best effort traffic to the FCC:

Comcast says that sustained use of 70% of your up or downstream throughput triggers the BE state, at which point you’ll find your traffic priority lowered until your usage drops to 50% of your provisioned upstream or downstream bandwidth for “a period of approximately 15 minutes.” A throttled Comcast user being placed in a BE state “may or may not result in the user’s traffic being delayed or, in extreme cases, dropped before PBE traffic is dropped.”

Note that upstream and downstream bandwidth are managed separately. Also note that the differentiation between PBE and BE traffic occurs in two millisecond increments. According to Comcast, even if the packets for a best effort throttled user missed 50 “busses,” the delay would only be about one-tenth of a second.

In addition to the new throttling system, Comcast has also a 250GB monthly usage cap for all users. As we mentioned last Friday, Comcast has confirmed that a web portal-based bandwidth tracker is currently in beta among Comcast employees — but has yet to give an official launch date. A Comcast insider had previously given us leaked screenshots of the monitor, and said it was originally scheduled to go live on January 5 (today).

Comcast has confirmed to us that they’ve completed the upgrade to the new system.
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After the previous owner had cable TV service for ten years, a user in our Charter forum complains he was told that his new home was no longer serviceable, and the drop to his home was terminated. While that sounds stupid, the customer is slightly too far for digital services to work without extending the network plant, and that costs Charter money with no guarantee the customer will remain with Charter.

Obviously that’s a big deal for a cable company that currently holds 20% of the entire cable industry’s debt, but serves just 8% of the industry’s customers. Unfortunately for this particular customer, he’s out of DSL range and trees prevent WISP or satellite access. The customer tells his tale of woeful unconnectedness:

This is a common complaint, the cost for extending the plant ten thousand or more feet running into the tens of thousands of dollars. We’ve seen many instances where the customer is willing to foot the bill for much smaller extensions of a few hundred feet, and still been refused. Any cable customers who’ve conquered similar situations have any recommendations?
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Netflix has been making waves in the broadband video space by integrating their service into everything, from the Roku set top and the Xbox 360, to TiVO units and DVD players. Now Netflix says they’ll be integrating the service into HDTVs from LG Electronics. This is the first time the Netflix service will be embedded directly into a television. Tim Alessi, director of product development for LG Electronics USA, says the Netflix-enhanced TVs will sell for roughly 0 to 0 more than a regular HDTV set.
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The RIAA recently announced they’d hashed out closed door deals with a number of ISPs to terminate the connections of customers who receive too many warning letters from the industry. Their existing system of DMCA letter generation relies on data collected by largely unaccountable and secretive organizations like BayTSP and Media Sentry. Picking up on an earlier P2PNet report by Jon Newton, the Wall Street Journal reports the RIAA has fired the controversial Media Sentry, instead hiring DtecNet out of Copenhagen to monitor your BitTorrent bad habits.
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Last May, we broke the news that Comcast would be implementing a 250GB monthly bandwidth cap. In October, that cap went live without an official usage monitor. Last December, a Comcast insider leaked us word (and screenshots) of a new bandwidth meter they told us would go live January 5 (next Monday). According to our source, the tool won’t show bandwidth usage in real time, but will operate under a three hour delay. It will also retain three months of bandwidth usage records, and will come with the option of monitoring multiple MAC addresses.

When asked for comment this afternoon on whether the tool drops next week, Comcast would only confirm that the meter is still being worked on. The company wouldn’t confirm the January 5 launch date, or provide a more specific launch window.

“We have not officially announced anything about launching the meter on a specific date,” says spokesman Charlie Douglas. “We are working on a meter and I can confirm that we are currently running an employee trial,” says Douglas.

“As soon as the trial is complete and we are completely satisfied with the tool, then we will launch it,” he says. “Until then, customers can use the meter included with our McAfee Security Suite or they can download and use a variety of meters that exist online.”

If it doesn’t drop on Monday it shouldn’t be too long of a wait. Comcast continues to insist that less than 1% of their users should ever brush against this cap. If you’re one of those, or you’re just curious about the new meter, keep your eye peeled on the Comcast excessive use FAQ.
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The promise of Internet anonymity has always been a refuge for snake oil salesmen looking to profit from the RIAA’s scorched earth legal campaign. There have been countless operations over the years that have offered everything from specialized VPN software and supposedly anonymous DSL to proxy servers or encryption in order to supposedly protect users from the ever watchful eye of the entertainment industry.

With the RIAA now supposedly ditching the “sue ‘em all” campaign in exchange for making ISPs Internet babysitters, the market is apparently hot once again for anonymity products, particualy ones capable of dodging looming ISP filters. Torrent Freak directs our attention to a new outfit named VPN4Life, which is promising a lifetime of unlimited, anonymous VPN-based BitTorrent access for (.00 introductory). From the site:

Like most promises of Internet anonymity this is likely not a high quality operation, especially considering the fact that traditional VPN services offering unlimited data transfers cost in the neighborhood of - per month.
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The VoIP sector suffered an existential crisis this week, with many in the industry debating whether the technology was alive, dead, or on life support. Former Microsoft manager Alec Saunders declared that VoIP was dead. Jeff Pulver, co-founder of Vonage and founder of Free World Dial Up insists that VoIP is far from dead. Jeff retains the revolutionary tone popular before the SunRocket kerfuffle marred consumer opinion of independent VoIP:

Others correctly observe that VoIP has simply changed shape. Gone are the “change the world” discussions of voice simply being data with an inevitable price point of zero. In their place is a residential VoIP market now dominated (to the tune of almost 90%) by the nation’s largest cable operators. Comcast is now the nation’s fourth largest phone company, adding half a million VoIP subscribers in the third quarter alone.

On the opposite trajectory is Vonage, the poster child for the independent VoIP movement, who many predict will finally fold in 2009. While Vonage struggles, the nation’s two largest phone companies are prepared to finally take VoIP more seriously. Previously hamstrung by fears that they’d further cannibalize declining landline revenues, both AT&T and Verizon have major plans for VoIP in 2009.

Residential VoIP isn’t dead as much as it is transformed — from baby boomer with revolutionary ambitions, to a mid-level office manager dreaming of a bigger cubicle. Just a few years ago, the talk was about how pesky upstart VoIP operators would someday make voice communications free. Now, the talk is about whether you’ll be getting your VoIP/broadband/TV triple play from a phone or a cable company.
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