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. 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.

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. From the Kabel-X description of the technology:Delicious, just like the white filling of an Oreo. Those interested can watch this video for more detail.

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. That said, AT&T has issued an entirely new press release that "sets the record straight" on AT&T's dispute with big red.

"As the U.S.