As part of their franchise agreement with New York City, Verizon was required to deploy FiOS services to every home in New York City by 2014 though the agreement allows Verizon lawyers to wiggle over, under and around those obligations should Verizon not see the kind of service uptake they’d like. According to Verizon, they’ve now passed about 1.8 million homes and businesses, or 58% of the roughly 3.1 million households in New York City.

Verizon says they’re ahead of their agreement to pass 54% of NYC premises by the end of this year. Of course while Verizon is moving forward with FiOS deployment in several cities where they’ve signed franchise agreements, they’ve frozen overall FiOS expansion elsewhere.

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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.

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