Apparently taking a page out of this month's advertising debate between AT&T and Verizon, Canadian carrier Telus has sued Rogers Communications for ads claiming that the Rogers wireless network is "the fastest and most reliable in the country." Telus and Bell Canada have of course just launched their new, $1 billion HSPA network, which offers speeds up to 21 Mbps to Canadian customers. As such, Telus demanded earlier this month that Rogers stop making advertising claims that they held the 3G speed edge -- a request Rogers ignored, since they too offer 21 Mbps HSPA+ service. "Telus has not submitted any data on their network performance and we look forward to vigorously defending our position in court," says Rogers.

While the United States FCC prepares to begin construction of new network neutrality rules tomorrow, users in Canada saw Canadian regulatory authority the CRTC issue some new network neutrality rules today. While the new rules don't prohibit Canadian ISPs from imposing the network management of their choice, they do force carriers to be wholly transparent with consumers, while giving retail customers thirty days and consumers at least 60 days before imposing any new traffic management.

The CRTC's involvement was of course triggered when Bell Canada decided to start throttling wholesale customers without telling them in the Spring of 2008. Independent Canadian ISPs complained the throttling was to prevent them from offering an unthrottled residential broadband alternative to Bell Canada's throttled DSL services.

As was expected, Canadian cable operator Rogers Communications today issued a press release announcing they've launched faster DOCSIS 3.0 speeds in "select areas of the Greater Toronto Area." According to Rogers, the new 50Mbps tier costs $150 Canadian ($129 US) a month, a fairly expensive proposition given the tier's sluggish 2Mbps upstream speed and the tier's 175GB per month cap. Rogers says they're also boosting their $96 "Extreme Plus" tier from 10Mbps to 25Mbps, and increasing its cap to 125GB.

A letter is being sent out to Rogers TV customers informing them that CRTC (Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission) requires that a new 1.5% service fee for "The Local Programming Improvement Fund (LPIF)" to be added to the bill starting on August 31 2009. This new percent based fee is suppose to help "local" programming stay alive in markets that have less than 1 million views. The "LPIF" is not a flat fee, so people with higher cable television bills will be paying more. The fund is a response by the CRTC to the CTV national broadcaster Save Local TV campaign conducted earlier in the year. CTV argued that Local TV would disappear unless the cable company was forced to help pay for its production.

Canadian broadband operator Rogers Communications has dropped us a line to note that they're rolling out 50Mbps DOCSIS 3.0 service next month. What's more, the carrier says they're the first cable operator in North America to offers users a 802.11n-based home gateway. "We're running a contest where we're giving away 50 N gateways to eligible customers who sign up for 50 Mbps service," Rogers' Stacey Fowler tells us.

According to a carrier press release, the first fifty customers to register here will get a free 802.11N gateway, valued at around $200.

Before you do that, you should note that the new tier's very pricey at $150 Canadian ($129 U.S.), only offers 2Mbps upstream, and comes with a 125GB per month cap (plus overages). Rogers has also traditionally been at the forefront of fiddling with traffic throttling as part of their never-ending game of cat and mouse with P2P users.

Judging from discussion in our Rogers forum, it looks like many customers might pass on this latest offer.