In recent weeks, AT&T has been hit with a blizzard of bad news.

It's 3Q2011 earnings were off estimates. It's merger with T-Mobile is looking less and less likely with the FCC report, its own smoking gun and the DOJ trial. It received horrible ratings for customer service - again. It was caught up in the CarrierIQ rootkit mess. 

The only good news was that it was able to buy the Qualcomm spectrum. This purchase won't solve many of its issues but it will give the network some breathing room. (Unless the same engineers who admittedly mismanaged the wireless network before are still at work at Ma Bell.) 

Today, a notice was released that AT&T Southeast has exhausted its VLAN numbers in Atlanta and South Florida LATA's for Metro Ethernet. It's utterly mind boggling to me. Would you let AT&T manage your network? 

IN other news, VZW scooped up even more AWS spectrum from Cox for $315M. It looks like VZW has sales agent agreements in place with 4 MSO's now - Bright House, Cox, Comcast and TW Cable. Can you say leaving my competition in the dust?

While AT&T was mired down with the merger - and Sprint was stumbling over that same merger - VZW has been taking the necessary steps to win the cellular race. Will Sprint or AT&T be able to catch up?