The Pittsburgh City Council today voted unanimously (9-0) to give Verizon a FiOS franchise in the city, after the two sides haggled over local TV funding and the installation of a small local support center. The agreement requires that Verizon deploy FiOS to the entire city within six years, though such agreements generally include plenty of wiggle room for Verizon. Efforts to include an amendment that would have Verizon funding local public access TV failed, though Verizon will have to provide a local support center.

While Verizon's been busy selling more rural, unprofitable markets, they've been on a bit of a tear lately signing citywide FiOS franchise agreements with major east coast cities, including New York City, Washington DC and Philadelphia. The push goes hand in hand with a new focus on apartment buildings, using new bendable fiber and smaller MDUs.

"I can almost guarantee you that we'll probably get better service, and you won't be stuck with such high bills," Councilwoman Tonya Payne tells Pittsburgh Post Gazette, suggesting she didn't study the issues before voting, given the telco lobbyist promise of lower prices created by TelcoTV entering a new market never seems to materialize.

In direct price to price comparisons, limited duopoly competition gives cable and phone companies the luxury of non-price competition -- which in turn allows them to raise individual service prices in concert. Still, Pittsburgh residents now get an option other than Comcast, and can either sign up for FiOS -- or threaten Comcast with cancellation in order to net lower long-term contract bundle pricing.

As we've noted countless times, Comcast had promised to have 65% of their network upgraded to DOCSIS 3.0 technology by the end of this year, and 100% of their network upgraded by the end of 2010. In addition to doubling the speeds on existing tiers, the upgrades deliver new $62.95 22Mbps/5Mbps and $99 "Extreme 50" 50Mbps/10Mbps tiers, both of which require a new DOCSIS 3.0 modem. Comcast now tells us that the deployment is going so well, they should be able to accomplish considerably more installs than originally predicted.

"We have raised our goal to roll out DOCSIS 3.0 to nearly 80% of our national footprint before the end of this year," Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas tells us.

For years the baby bells have been trying to slow (or ignore) the death of the landline by forcing DSL customers to bundle one, whether they wanted it or not. That's why it's kind of refreshing to see this Verizon ad (pdf), forwarded to us by a reader, that actually encourages customers to drop their landline. "These days, more and more people are looking for ways to cut costs and save money," begins the ad, which says that "this is a great opportunity for you to cut down on costs by making your wireless phone your only phone."

So what prompts this change of heart about the landline, which for years was an inseparable part of the carrier's bundle? Reality for one thing, and cable VoIP for another. Cable VoIP growth is explosive (Comcast's the third largest phone company), and it makes sense that the carrier advertises their strength (wireless) in the cable fight to keep defecting customers in house.

The past several years have seen ISPs continually expand their operations away from their core competency: running networks. AT&T is developing a three dimensional browser, Time Warner Cable/Roadrunner dabbles in used car sales, while Cox has spent the last few years exploring the real estate market. One customer writes in to note that Comcast is e-mailing customers to announce a new online Travel Agency search engine -- run in partnership with Kayak. Comcast of course would argue they're now a broadband and online content company, having in the past few years launched a now-shuttered YouTube knockoff named Ziddio, and purchased Fandango, movies.com, and dailycandy.com.

Luckily, unlike other ISPs with the content bug, Comcast is at least aggressively upgrading their network first. Many other ISPs have been throwing millions at content projects at the side, while complaining that they lack the resources to keep up with a growing demand for bandwidth, consumed in part by the very content they're increasingly trafficking in.

Comcast issued their fourth quarter earnings this morning, showing that the cable giant took a slight hit from the stumbling economy. Comcast added 247,000 digital cable subscribers in Q4, down from the 530,000 added in the fourth quarter last year. It added 184,000 high-speed Internet customers, down from last year's 341,000, and it added 340,000 voice customers, down from last year's 490,000 (still pretty stellar). Comcast also announced a basic video subscriber loss of 233,000.