The move represents yet another setback for AT&T, which clearly hoped that the DOJ inquiry could move forward — ostensibly with a positive outcome on broader antitrust issues — in such a way that it might change the FCC’s mind about approving merger.

The Wall Street Journal had details today, including AT&T’s plea to the DOJ to keep things moving:

ATT lawyers in court urged the judge to maintain the current trial schedule. “We’re not playing some strategic game,” AT&T lawyer Mark Hansen told the judge.

Any delay in antitrust proceedings could put more pressure on Deutsche Telekom AG (DTE.XE, DTEGY) as uncertainty for T-Mobile drags on. The deadline for closing the merger can be extended to as late as September. But in the meantime, T-Mobile is in limbo, complicating relationships with customers and business partners.

Well of course AT&T is “playing a game” — it’s just not doing it very well at the moment.

The FCC isn’t buying that argument.

“We clarify that a call is considered to be originated by a [mobile network operator] . . . only if the calling party initiating the call has done so through a [mobile network operator],” wrote the FCC in the 750-page reform order. “Where a provider is merely providing a transiting service, it is well established that a transiting carrier is not considered the originating carrier.”

To remove any doubt about which mobile network operator it might be talking about, the FCC specifically referenced Halo in several footnotes associated with the pertinent section of the order.

The clarification is a small victory for small telephone companies that saw their access revenues decline as a result of Halo’s actions, including the 20 or so small telcos that brought complaints against Halo.

Tomorrow Connected Planet will look at the broader impact of USF and ICC reforms outlined in the reform order.

Lurie told MarketWatch in an interview today that “churn has not moved at all,” following the availability of the iPhone on rival networks, including arch competitor Verizon Wireless (CP: Verizon rides iPhone boom too; but what about LTE?) and Sprint (CP: Sprint iPhone with unlimited data may not budge users from AT&T, Verizon). According to the story:

Despite the success of Apple, Mr. Lurie urged investors not to count out other device makers such as Nokia Corp. and Research in Motion Ltd., maker of the Blackberry, and added that the carrier needs them to remain competitive to ensure innovation.

In its most recent earnings call in late October (CP: AT&T doesn’t take Q3 off to wait for the iPhone), AT&T said it sold 4.8 million smartphones in the third quarter, helping it to boost revenues per user, lower churn and top the 100 million mark for total subscribers. Of those phones, 2.4 million were iPhones; the rest were spread between Android (mainly), BlackBerry and Windows Phone 7 devices, the carrier said.

Overall churn for the third quarter fell from 1.32% to 1.28% year-over-year – which may have given Lurie the ammunition to make his claim this week – although postpaid churn for the operator did tick up one point to 1.15%.

The source of the rumor actually has some wireless chops: John Stanton, currently chairman of venture capital firm Trilogy Partnership and a long-time mobile executive (including stints at McCaw and VoiceStream. Stanton was quoted in MacWorld, saying that Jobs…

“…wanted to replace carriers. He and I spent a lot of time talking about whether synthetically you could create a carrier using Wi-Fi spectrum. That was part of his vision.”

Jobs gave up on the idea around 2007, Stanton said – we imagine it had something to do with the massive technical and economic challenges that stood in the way of his “vision” (which, by the way, real-world mobile operators are putting in place today via a variety of mobile data offload strategies, including wider use of Wi-Fi).

Nonetheless, Stanton touted the major impact Jobs and Apple had on wireless operators. “If I were a carrier, I’d be concerned about the dramatic shift in power that occurred,” he said.

While the way the mobile industry works has certainly been twisted about, it’s very hard to make the claim that large mobile operators are suffering. In fact, with the demand for mobile data continuing to soar, the iPhone now in play at most carriers around the globe and the near-monopoly that Apple owned in the early days of the apps ecosystem disassembling by the day, we’d argue that mobile operators are in a great position to reassert their power as owners of both the underlying network and the customer relationship.

While mobile operators certainly have much to worry about these days, massive infrastructure route-around claims from Google, Apple, the PC industry (white space data) or elsewhere certainly aren’t high on their lists.

T-Mobile, with Duea’s help and energy, is aiming to change that.

It seems to be working. In recent days, T-Mobile – obviously with the mega AT&T merger still hanging over it – has nonetheless managed some moves that definitely fall outside the norm. Examples include its Bobsled VoIP service, which offers free calling and messaging on other networks (CP: Bobsled app lets T-Mobile cozy up to iPhone, iPad users); and a $30 per month, data-centric mobile plan it is offering via Wal-Mart (CP: T-Mobile and Walmart announce 4G no-contract offer).

Duea, in charge of the app, wholesale and device teams that drive many of these innovations, noted that the industry is entering a third wave in how they view carriers – and how carriers ought to view themselves. A few years ago (not even that long ago, to be honest), the carrier “walled garden” ruled the day. In the past few years, more open devices and app ecosystems have come into vogue, carriers be damned (or at least routed around).

Today, yet another “shift” is happening and “it is forcing carriers to use new muscles and do things differently.” At issue: the fact that app stores are today crowded with hundreds of thousands of applications, with the customer experience (especially outside of early adopters) suffering as a result. In response, the mobile ecosystem is starting to ask how mobile operators can help sort through the mess. “It’s been fascinating being inside a carrier” as this change has taken place, Duea said.

The answer for an upstart like T-Mobile has been to adopt the agile development and product creation approaches of the Internet industry, Duea said. That means two-week development cycle and trying out new features in the marketplace, rather than in the lab – versus typical telco development cycles that can span months if not years and run through, at times, multiple “waterfall reviews.”

“We figured out a way to go around” such heavy processes, Duea said, focusing on working with partners and sending services over the top of its own network – and the networks of others. That’s not to say Duea’s team ignores telco assets. For instance, T-Mobile is one of the first operators out the door with a strong carrier billing play, an approach that Duea described as “one click to the bill.”

Among the opportunities Small said Verizon sees for EV-DO: wholesaling capacity to other operators; enabling lower-cost pre-paid service models; supporting time-of-day routing and pricing strategies; and even delivering dial-up substitution in some areas. “We’re thinking about it in a number of different ways, and our belief is we’re going to continue to monetize it for some period of time.”

Small certainly talked about Verizon’s growing LTE network (CP: 2011 LTE goal reached, Verizon continues expansion) and steps beyond that as well, for instance, noting that Advanced LTE isn’t quite ready for prime-time yet, at least as he sees it.

In response to an audience question, Small once again affirmed Verizon’s interest in using small cell technology to augment its LTE roll-out, a stance it made clear for perhaps the first time at last week’s 4G World event (CP: Verizon exploring small cells for adding future capacity). “We generally think about macrocells as coverage, then when we need pockets of capacity, we’ll look at small cells,” CTO Small said, whilenot advocating a specific small cell approach and bundling in approaches like Wi-Fi upload into the mix as well.

In many ways, Small’s mention of both EV-DO and small cell options represents the pragmatic approach of an engineer/CTO looking at available resources in creative ways.

In fact, Small said that even beyond new radio options, there are probably a dozen under-the-cover technologies – for instance, video optimization that ensures that bandwidth-heavy HD videos don’t get sent to mobile subscribers – that Verizon uses every day to improve the mobile broadband customer experience.

If anything, that sort of network engineering – which he described as “measuring, planning, engineering, building and monitoring…every single hour of every day” – could impact the customer experience as much as more-hyped network upgrades, he said.

According to Traffix, the company has secured $7 million in financing in a round led by Bessemer Venture Partners. The vendor said:

The funds will be used to expand Traffix’s market penetration with telecom carriers around the world as more of them roll out 4G networks that require next-generation, network signaling solutions to handle increased data traffic. The company boasts nearly 100 global deployments and is profitable.

In the filing, Clearwire said that Wolff wasn’t leaving due to any disagreements with the board or its management—he’s just leaving. Wolff is Clearwire’s former CEO and has been with the company since Eagle River Investments created it in2004, serving as at different times as executive vice president, president, co-CEO, CEO and co-chairman.

Wolff has a long history with Clearwire founder Craig McCaw and has been associated—often as McCaw’s second in command–with all of his recent business ventures. In many cases, Wolff has taken over the reins from McCaw after a company’s initial infancy.

Such was the case with Clearwire, which Wolff co-founded with McCaw and led through the complicated negotiations that resulted in Sprint, Intel, Google and the cable operators taking massive stakes in the company. Wolff is now CEO of Pendrell Corporation, which is essentially what remains of ICO Global, another Craig McCaw venture that planned to launch a ground-and-terrestrial-based broadcast TV netwok but wound up selling its satellite spectrum to Dish Network. McCaw’s investment arm, Eagle River, still holds the Clearwire board seat and has told Clearwire it plans to nominate a replacement.

As for Clearwire’s decision to cut its contract plans, the company is paving the way for its new life solely as wholesale provider. Clearwire is effectively going back to its roots, becoming a streamlined mobile broadband operator that sells mobile broadband by the month for a flat fee. While it will continue to support its current contract customers, its eliminating all future device subsidies, device leases, restocking fees and any other entanglement that would prevent it from eliminating its retail operations in the future.

Clearwire’s business model has fundamentally changed in the last year. It’s no longer expanding its WiMAX network and its future time division-LTE network won’t even cover entire markets, making a retail LTE service impossible. Rather it plans to lease supplementary capacity to operators with existing mobile broadband networks (CP: As the 4G World forks, Clearwire chooses both paths).

Color Broadband runs dozens of WiMAX point-to-multipoint transmission towers in LA and Orange Country, running from the San Fernando Valley in the northwest to Newport Beach in the southeast, which will give Towerstream a 20% larger footprint in the region. Towerstream will also get Color’s customers, which will grow the company’s subscriber base by 60% and its revenues by 70%.

While Towerstream is facing increasing competition in the 12 large metro markets it serves, it finds itself facing off primarily against local ISPs while it is able to boast much larger scale. Consequently Towerstream has taken to buying up some of its competitors (CP: Towerstream growing through acquisition). The Color Broadband acquisition is its fourth since April of 2011, but by far its largest.

No, the Forum hasn’t thrown into towel, conceding that Wi-Fi will be the offload and additive capacity of the future. Rather it’s trying to find a middle ground where Wi-Fi and femtos cannot only coexist but communicate simultaneously with the same devices, said Andy Germano, the Forum’s vice chair. Femtocell makers recognize that Wi-Fi has plenty of uses, but there are things that an access point dumb to the carrier’s network just can’t do, Germano said. The Forum wants to develop guidelines and interfaces that will allow for both technologies to play up their strengths, Germano said.

The Forum wants the mobile cellular network to make all decisions over what’s routed to Wi-Fi, rather than have phones simply switch over to an access point and disappear from the network. By maintaining a constant signaling connection over the cellular network the carrier can then decide the optimal network for traffic to take. For instance, if a customer is viewing over-the-top video, the network senses it can’t add any value to the transaction and shunts that data stream over to Wi-Fi. If, however, the customer is accessing a service like voice or messaging provided by the operator, the network could chose to keep that traffic on its own systems as it would be routed straight to its core anyway. The technology would be versatile enough that networks can route data simultaneously over both Wi-Fi and cellular, Germano said. For instance a video service provide by or in partnership with the operator could maintain an signaling link with the device for authentication, billing and value-added features, while running the raw video stream over Wi-Fi.

If this all sounds like a technology InterDigital and PicoChip recently proposed (CP: InterDigital, PicoChip meld Wi-Fi with femtos for mobile offload), there’s a reason. InterDigital is actually leading the Femto Forum working group developing the Wi-Fi specification. The Forum is hoping that converged Wi-Fi access point/femtocells will emerge from the work, creating a super offload hotspot of sorts, but it is also working with other groups in 3GPP to make the standard node independent. That would allow devices to communicate simultaneously with the macro network and the Wi-Fi network.