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.

The country of Finland recently declared they were making broadband a legal right, requiring that all 5.3 million of the country's residents be served by 1 Mbps service by next summer, and 100 Mbps service by 2015. That's a little easier to do in a country like Finland, which has just 5.3 million residents to our 300+ million, and doesn't have to deal with things like, well, Montana. Spain too this week has decided to make 1 Mbps broadband for all a legal right by 2011, expanding their universal service fund to help fund deployment into coverage gaps, according to Reuters: story continues..

Last year Canadian incumbent Bell Canada throttled the bandwidth of wholesale competitors, so they couldn't offer unthrottled services that were better than Bell's own, throttled DSL service. The company then started pushing for usage-based billing (UBB) for wholesalers, meaning competitors would now be paying for bandwidth on both ends (smaller Canadian ISPs lament this as double dipping and a tactic designed to drive them out of business). Bell Canada has justified the moves by saying they're financially necessary in order to fund network expansion. However, BCE's earnings this week indicate the company's profit more than doubled. Why was usage-based billing necessary again? Surely someday, somebody is going to notice that the North American ISPs who claim expensive new metering models are financially necessary are never able to prove it.

Jeffrey M. O'Brien over at Fortune is the latest American with a sluggish DSL connection to suffer from Asian broadband envy, noting that Hong Kong provider City Telecom offers symmetrical 100 Mbps broadband service for about $13 a month. What's more, the ISP offers these users a money back guarantee: if they don't see at least 80% of their promised speed, their ISP pays them. Twice the amount the user paid for service.

In 2007, UK telco British Telecom called running fiber to the home "premature," instead opting to milk copper for a little longer. In 2008, they announced a widely lauded plan to invest in "fiber" (to the node), though the specifics weren't particularly impressive when you looked a little closer, and the "fiber to the press release" announcement was more about getting a regulatory back rub from the British Government. According to British Telecom's CEO, DSL is like driving a Ford and really -- who isn't perfectly happy driving a Ford?

British Telecom has shown all the telltale signs of the spoiled monopoly broadband providers you're familiar with, from whining when people actually use their product, to throttling 8Mbps connections to 896kbps without bothering to tell anyone. Like most incumbents with investors, they'd prefer to pocket significant profits rather than invest that money back into the network -- even if the move would keep them relevant for decades.