It doesn't seem like that long ago that we chatted with AT&T about a lack of U-Verse deployment in BellSouth territory. Things on that front went slowly the first year or so after AT&T's BellSouth acquisition in 2006, but things have definitely been speeding up in 2009, with launches in Alabama, Tennessee, Louisiana and elsewhere. Expansion continues this week with U-verse popping up in Knoxville, Tennessee, and U-Verse VoIP expanding into Columbia, South Carolina and Charlotte, North Carolina. According to AT&T earnings released last week, AT&T now serves 1.8 million U-Verse customers nationally, adding 240,000 in the third quarter.

J.D. Power and Associates has released their 2009 Internet Service Provider Residential Customer Satisfaction Study, which ranks ISPs on five factors: performance and reliability; cost of service; customer service; billing; and offerings and promotions. According to the results (broken down by geographical area here), Verizon took the top spot in the east, Wide Open West took the top spot in the North Central region, Earthlink took the top spot in the west, and Bright House Networks took the top spot in the south. Some key findings from the latest survey, which polled 23,997 users:

• Overall satisfaction with broadband service is 639 on a 1,000-point scale, an increase of 22 index points compared with 2008.

A new report by Sandvine Corporation confirms what other reports this month from Cisco and Arbor Networks also suggested: P2P's share of overall capacity is down, and video use of all kinds is exploding. The study tracked traffic from 20 carriers and 24 million subscribers, mirroring much of what Cisco recently reported. Namely, that Internet "prime time" is later than TV prime time, and live video use is surging. Sandvine says that 26.6 percent of total traffic is "real-time entertainment traffic" (video, gaming, music), while P2P use dropped from 32% to 20%. As we noted the other day this doesn't mean P2P is "dying."

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.

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. It's five years later and WiMax is, well, a niche player in a very big pond. According to a new study from research firm Ovum, it's likely to stay that way.