AT&T and the State of Connecticut haven't exactly been getting along. The State has angered the powerful telco by requiring AT&T U-Verse adhere to cable franchise law (a fight AT&T won), requiring AT&T grant homeowner consent before plunking bulky U-Verse VRADs down in front of customer homes, and by investigating poor customer service in the state. AT&T has now annoyed Connecticut, by firing sixty individuals in the state and moving the jobs to Michigan. "AT&T's customer service has deteriorated after the company eliminated nearly 1,000 customer service related jobs in recent years," says State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal to the local media. "These latest layoffs will further degrade customer care, in clear violation of legal standards."

Back in July AT&T announced that the company’s agreement with Dish Network to sell bundled TV, phone and broadband packages would be terminated at the end of this year. This caused speculation that the purpose of the announcement was to incite a bidding war for AT&T partnership between Dish and DirecTV. AT&T has now announced a partnership to market and sell co-branded DirecTV services starting in January 2009. These services will be marketed in areas where AT&T does not offer its own U-Verse service. Dish customers who get their service through AT&T will continue receiving their services through January 31st. After that, Dish could be in some trouble; AT&T’s partnership with DirecTV comes on the heels of Dish’s first-ever quarterly subscriber loss, a problem which was not experienced by DirecTV. The new partnership with AT&T gives DirecTV another boost in the competition between the two satellite providers.

Last quarter, both AT&T and Verizon reported the lowest DSL subscriber gains ever. To try and improve their fortunes, AT&T is running a promotion that locks your current DSL prices down for two years with no price hikes. Verizon, meanwhile, is offering free DSL broadband service for six months if users sign up for their voice/broadband bundle. As the Wall Street Journal notes, these deals could start getting more impressive if these new offers don't do enough to keep customers away from cable operators. The Journal seems eager to call this a "price war," but that's probably a little too generous.

AT&T has told Dish Network that the telco is ending their agreement at the end of the year to sell bundled TV, phone and broadband packages. According to Reuters, AT&T Is setting the stage for a bidding war between DirecTV and Dish Network for who'll get to partner with the nation's largest broadband provider. Obviously AT&T wants consumers to use their U-Verse IPTV service, but they're still going to want a DBS partner in the significant number of market where U-Verse won't be profitable to deploy. It's not particularly good news for Dish, which was already facing a decline in subscribers. I've dropped a line to AT&T to see how this will impact the Homezone DSL/DBS service they offer in conjunction with Dish Network.

Last week P2P client developers Azureus/Vuze released data they collected from a new Azureus plugin. That plugin detects the total number of network interruptions from false RST TCP packets, with some highly contested results. As we've covered extensively, Comcast uses false RST TCP packets to throttle upstream P2P traffic. The Azureus data ranked ISPs by the percentage of network interruptions caused by these packets, though the data doesn't discern between routine or intentional disruptions.