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.

Apparently taking a page out of this month's advertising debate between AT&T and Verizon, Canadian carrier Telus has sued Rogers Communications for ads claiming that the Rogers wireless network is "the fastest and most reliable in the country." Telus and Bell Canada have of course just launched their new, $1 billion HSPA network, which offers speeds up to 21 Mbps to Canadian customers. As such, Telus demanded earlier this month that Rogers stop making advertising claims that they held the 3G speed edge -- a request Rogers ignored, since they too offer 21 Mbps HSPA+ service. "Telus has not submitted any data on their network performance and we look forward to vigorously defending our position in court," says Rogers.

After spending the last week or so taking pot shots at each other, AT&T and Verizon met in court yesterday to do legal battle over Verizon's latest wireless ads, which criticize AT&T's 3G network coverage and performance. AT&T had complained to the courts that the 3G coverage maps (clearly labeled as such) in the ads could confuse customers into thinking customers didn't get voice and EDGE coverage in non-3G markets. The Judge overseeing the case has not surprisingly denied AT&T's request to have the ads pulled, but has set a December 16 date to hear further arguments in the case.

Of course by the time this is settled, the "damage" to AT&T will already have been done -- made worse in this case by all the extra attention AT&T's suit brought to Verizon's ads, and in turn AT&T's network coverage. To try and make up some ground, AT&T has launched a new series of ads featuring Luke Wilson, proclaiming rather vaguely that AT&T offers "the best 3G experience." Surely there's some AT&T customers who'd like to take AT&T to task on that claim after the last year's worth of iPhone connectivity issues, belated MMS functionality and other problems?

At this point, AT&T's probably better off just giving those advertising and legal fees to their network engineers, who are in the field busily trying to upgrade the network and migrating markets to 850MHz.

As promised, the FCC today voted to impose a shot clock aimed at speeding up municipal approval for the placing of wireless towers. According to an FCC news release (pdf), the new agency rules impose a 90 day limit to states and municipalities to approve or deny collocation (tower sharing) requests, and 150 day limit to act on new tower placement requests. It's something the wireless industry has been lobbying for for a while. According to wireless industry lobbyists, (pdf) there's currently 760 new tower placement applications nationally that have been waiting for approval for at least a year, and 180 applications that have been waiting at least three years (though the industry has been known to play up government dysfunction for effect). Municipalities are expected to challenge the ruling in the courts over fears that they'd be ceding too much state zoning control to Uncle Sam.

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. They're useful to carriers, in that they ease strain on local towers, but so far many operators have done a pretty poor job marketing the devices to users or offering consumer value in pricing models. For whatever reason ABI poo poo's the value issues, and instead blames the recession:It's hard to blame femtocell's slow adoption on the economy or getting the services deployed.