Users at DSLreports.com are sharing stories of lost AT&T EDGE connectivity in the New York metropolitan area this morning. Non-3G iPhones and Nokias are affected, too, so it's not an iPhone-specific problem.

The New York Times pored over the details of AT&T's new overseas data plans for the iPhone. Not only is it pricey, but absent-minded travelers (that's "I believe I'm slightly autistic" in the Valley, or in New York, "Anyone seen my Adderall?") will find themselves paying a lot more than they planned:

So that's what those things are. The box in the photo holds equipment for AT&T's U-verse cable service. The grumpy guy is David Crommie, president of the Cole Valley Improvement Association. He's torqued because AT&T got an exemption from environmental review requirements to install up to 850 of these things around the city. You'll also see smaller green boxes on city sidewalks — those are Comcast's. Verizon manages to bury all its equipment underground. The CVIA has stalled AT&T's plans, but the San Francisco Daily Post reports that "AT&T is now expected to reapply for exemption." (Photo by AP/Paul Sakuma)

A tipster sent our gadget sister site, Gizmodo, a copy of Verizon's talking points for its employees to use against iPhone mania. Like last year's leaked "iWhatever" email from COO Jack Plating, it comes across mostly as validation that there's no phone like the iPhone in buyers' eyes.But I disagree with my esteemed colleague Kit Eaton at Gizmodo on one thing: AT&T's network is indeed the iPhone's weak spot. At least 50 percent of the U.S. population lives in an area not served by AT&T 3G. Even David Pogue's iPhone musical called out AT&T service quality as a minus. Verizon's EVDO network — which reaches 80 percent of Americans, per the cheat sheet — would be a much better match. Someday.

AT&T has launched a "Geek Squad meets Fire Dog" IT service called AT&T ConnecTech. The company told USA Today that ConnecTech will provide home technical services in all 50 states: Home networking. Household tech support. Home theater installation. Having dealt with AT&T's "We don't have to — we're the phone company" attitude for years, I predict ConnecTech will be more like "Geek Squad meets the DMV."AT&T is already huge provider of telco and IT services to small business. Its track record is one of notoriously complex business processes that get in the way. If you schedule a "turn-up" to activate a new T1 line, you'll learn more than you want about AT&T internal politics. If your onsite technician doesn't show, your attempt to track him down gets ping-ponged around AT&T's org chart. Could be he has the wrong phone number or address. Could be he checked you off as done and took a vaca, as happened to Valleywag editor Paul Boutin's home-office installation. To AT&T, it's your problem. "Sorry, we have no available slots to reschedule until next week." Want to get a reverse DNS record created, so you can send mail to EarthLink and Comcast without being spam-filtered? AT&T's answer: We can't do that unless we take over your DNS hosting entirely. I don't expect the company's attempt to expand into home service to change its corporate culture. Instead, I pity ConnecTech's frontline support people. God help them when they try to explain AT&T bureaucracy to people who've been spoiled by FedEx.

Here's our theory: Daily deadlines did in the newspaper industry. The pressure of getting to press, the long-practiced art of doom-and-gloom headline writing, the flinchiness of easily spooked editors all made it impossible for ink-stained wretches to look farther into the future than the next edition. Speaking of doom and gloom: Online ad revenues at several major newspaper chains actually dropped last quarter. The surprise there is that they ever managed to rise. The newspaper industry has a devastating history of letting the future of media slip from its grasp. Where to start? Perhaps 1995, when several newspaper chains put $9 million into a consortium called New Century Network. "The granddaddy of fuckups," as one suitably crotchety industry veteran tells us, folded in 1998. Or you can go further back, to '80s adventures in videotext. But each tale ends the same way: A promising start, shuttered amid fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

An Alabama woman says Apple's become "unjustly enriched at the expense of Plaintiff and Class members" because her iPhone 3G doesn't get a good reception. She says where she lives supposedly gets good AT&T coverage and that her iPhone doesn't work as well as Apple said it would in its commercials. It's a common complaint. Check out the video comparing the speed of an iPhone in an Apple commercial versus real life embedded below . But we have to ask: instead of filing an expensive lawsuit, why doesn't the plaintiff just junk her iPhone and buy a Palm Centro or a Nokia N90? That seems easier and, you know, vastly less annoying to the rest of us.

In a letter to a congressional committee, AT&T said it is "carefully considering" monitoring how its users surf the Web. In a similiar letter, Internet service provider Charter Communication said it had plans to do the same. ISPs Bresnan Communications, CableOne, CenturyTell, Embarq, Knology and Wow already track their users' activities on the Web, according to Silicon Alley Insider, which put together a list of ISPs and portals that do and do not track users.

Hidden in the math of a Fortune summary of a report from investment bank Piper Jaffray: Apple Store sales only account for 2 of every 5 iPhones sold. AT&T stores sell one in five, and overseas phone stores sell the other 2. Using Piper Jaffray's estimates, you can summarize sales for the upcoming Xmas-gift-driven last quarter of the year as: 2 million through Apple's own stores, 1 million through AT&T, and 2 million elsewhere in the world. Then factor in your Best Buy prediction. What I want to know: What's 2 million times the average wait time in an iPhone line? (Chart by Piper Jaffray)

Dropped calls. Flaky high-speed connections. Short battery life. The San Francisco Chronicle rounds up not one, but two unhappy iPhone users and an analyst who backs them up to prove that this new iPhone thing isn't working as planned. Not to get all Fake Steve on these guys, but look: The problem isn't the iPhone. It's you two. The iPhone is so popular that AT&T's networks can't handle the load. The onboard apps — so easy to install, just go to the store, click, and boom, it's that simple — are so hypnotic that you're running out your batteries playing with them. Pull your pants up and look in the mirror. If you can't handle it that your phone is more popular than you are, maybe it's time you and the iPhone went your separate ways.

Broadband growth has fallen by half in a year. Cable and telephone providers of high-speed Internet signed up 887,000 net new customers last quarter — half of the number of signups in the same period last year. Because of market saturation, companies are focusing more on selling faster, more expensive services. Nationwide, cable companies have 35.3 million broadband customers while phone companies have 29.7 million. AT&T is still the nation's largest Internet service provider with 14.7 million customers, followed by Comcast with 14.4 million customers. It's good news for AOL and EarthLink, which are profiting from a core of dial-up subscribers reluctant to embrace DSL or cable Internet. [AP]

The website for AT&T's Web-computing-and-storage service, Synaptic Hosting, does not inspire confidence. Thanks to trademark-happy lawyers who insisted that the term "Synaptic Hosting" be followed by a service mark, the page's HTML title is broken. [AT&T]

AT&T has announced a cloud-computing service — hosted networking and storage, akin to Amazon.com's S3, Google's App Engine, and other Web services. Expect AT&T's version to offer higher service levels at a higher price. Called Synaptic, the service will be run from five supersized Internet data centers in New Jersey, Maryland, San Diego, Singapore and Amsterdam. The company has set up a high-profile demo: Teamusa.org, the U.S. Olympic Committee's site, is running on Synaptic.

Ted Stevens, the Republican Senator from Alaska who has held office for a record 40 years, has been indicted on seven counts of making false statements in connection with illegal influence peddling by the likes of convicted Veco CEO Bill Allen — who says the company dispatched employees to remodel Senator Stevens's Alaskan home and paid former Alaskan State Senator Ben Stevens, Ted Stevens's son, $234,000 in bribes. However, none of the indictments arises from his much-parodied description of Internet infrastructure as a "series of tubes."His strong opinions in the network neutrality debate may have something do with contributions from Internet service providers like Verizon and AT&T, which are respectively third and fifth on the list of largest contributors to his current re-election campaign, both ahead of oil industry services company Veco. He also counts News Corp. and Disney as top donors, and has championed broadcast flag provisions that would have required electronics manufacturers to bar users from recording digital audio or video flagged by rightsholders. The investigation by the Department of Justice has been going on for four years, having raided the senator's remodeled home last year. But it's clear that corporations have known that Senator Stevens's vote has been for sale for some time now. The bad news alone might spell doom for the senator's re-election campaign, which would count as good news for open Internet advocates — the Democratic challenger, Anchorage mayor Mark Begich, is a strong supporter of network neutrality legislation.

Joining Verizon, Time Warner Cable, and Sprint in press-releasing their concerns about child porn online, AOL and and AT&T announced today that they, too, will block their Internet service customers' access to Usenet newsgroups and websites suspected of hosting such illegal content. New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo engineered this arrangement, and California attorney general Jerry Brown and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (pictured here saving the children) are hot for a similar deal in-state.

US customers will be able to purchase new iPhones without locking themselves into a two-year contract with AT&T. It'll just cost an extra $400 — $599 for one with 8 gigabytes of storage, $699 for one with 16 gigabytes. Customers will still have to sign up for an AT&T wireless subscription, but it won't have the same penalties for changing carriers. Analysts figure it costs Apple about $173 to manufacture each iPhone, and believe Apple is selling the phones to AT&T at about $400 each. That means that at $599, Apple and AT&T are roughly splitting the extra $400 profit on an unlocked phone. Almost makes you wonder why AT&T bothers to sell subscriptions.

The average contribution from AT&T, Verizon and Sprint to the 94 Democratic congresscritters who change their votes from "no" to "yes" on the bill which would grant the companies immunity from charges of illegally wiretapping American citizens? $8,359. How much for all 293 "yes" votes, total? $2,830,087. Eleven California dems changed their votes — Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who represents San Francisco, scored $24,500 in sweet, sweet lobbyist contributions. [MAPLight.org] (Photo by AP/Susan Walsh)

Well, the Internet was fun while it lasted, but now three of the nation's largest service providers are going to shut it down and throw us all back to the dark ages of telephones and postage stamps. "Some people use the Internet simply to check e-mail and look up phone numbers. Others are online all day, downloading big video and music files. For years, both kinds of Web surfers have paid the same price for access. But now three of the country's largest Internet service providers are threatening to clamp down on their most active subscribers by placing monthly limits on their online activity."

The National Black Chamber of Commerce has weighed in against the partnership between Google and Yahoo, suggesting that by gaining control of Yahoo's search advertising inventory, it will create a single auction market for search ad placement and lead to higher prices.

Everywhere you look, a new iPhone price hike turns up. At $199, the phones themselves may be cheaper — but Apple and AT&T, the phone's exclusive carrier in the U.S., are charging users by other means. The iPhone data plan by itself is going up $10 to $30/mo. In a GigaOm interview, AT&T wireless chief Ralph de la Vega reveals that the 200 text messages previously included will cost iPhone users an extra $5/mo. ($20/mo. for unlimited messages, which seem practically obligatory.) And then there's Apple's MobileMe subscription, without which the iPhone's new synching features won't work, at $99 a year, or just over $8 a month. Add it up, and iPhone users will be paying about $43 a month, or $1,038 over the two-year course of the AT&T contract they signed up for — all to get an iPhone at $199.