The credit crunch and the slowing economy is beginning to impact everyone from mobile phone makers to phone companies. The economic woes are now spreading to other parts of the telecom food chain, taking down everyone from equipment makers to chip companies. And this is just the start… trouble has once again returned to the world of telecom. Earlier this month, Cisco Systems came out with an unusually downbeat forecast. The company, whose sales have traditionally seemed to defy gravity, admitted its numbers were going to fall for the first time in five years. Meanwhile its book-to-bill ratio — a key metric of future sales strength — has already dipped below 1.0.

“We are seeing customers, not just in the financial, automotive or retail sectors, but across most of our enterprise industries, facing what they view as a very challenging business environment,” Frank Calderoni, Cisco’s chief financial officer, told Wall Street analysts on a conference call. The problems, he said, have spread worldwide.

Cisco is widely considered to be a bellwether of the telecom and infrastructure sector. Its gloomy outlook, therefore, proves just how negatively affected the industry at large will be by the vise-like grip of the economic downturn.

AT&T’s Ralph de la Vega, CEO of that company’s mobility and consumer markets division, told me that anything related to the housing market was going to be in trouble. What that means is that the demand for broadband connections, voice lines and video services is going to slow drastically. Why? Because the growing number of new homes translated into strong demand for new communications services such as cable and broadband.

Now that the housing market has ground to a halt, sales of such services are going to decline, which in turn means that the service providers — from AT&T to Time Warner Cable — are going to have a tough time spending more dollars on their infrastructure. And that is going to impact sales at equipment makers.

After all, if there are fewer broadband connections, the number of modems needed will decline, and so will the demand for back-end gear to support those modems in broadband providers’ central offices. Similarly, if the demand for pay-per-view movies remains flat or declines, then the service providers won’t need to spend money on buying, say, video servers.

This is not a hypothetical situation. During a conference call to discuss its most recent quarterly results, Time Warner Cable said it was seeing lower gross additions and an increased churn in the number of customers. More importantly, those customers were buying fewer pay-per-view movies, premium channels and other add-ons, such as digital video recorders. This means its average revenue per user is going to decline. Since cable companies depend on their ability to generate gobs of cash from their customers to finance the buildout of their networks, cash constraints will mean fewer dollars to spend on gear.

U.S. phone companies, especially the ones with exposure to formerly hot housing markets in Arizona, California, Texas and Florida, are getting hit the hardest. AT&T and Qwest are both seeing steep declines in their wireline connections and a slowdown in demand for Internet connections. This isn’t going to get better anytime soon.

As a result, analysts expect carriers will spend a lot less money next year. UBS estimates that carrier spending will decline 4 percent in 2009 after growing 1 percent in 2008.

Similarly, a slowdown in the economy means that corporations will have fewer dollars to spend on their infrastructure, which is bad news for switch and router makers. Cisco’s gloomy outlook confirms that. So buckle up, guys. Trouble has returned to telecom land.

Following in the footsteps of Time Warner Cable, Frontier Communications and several UK Internet service providers, AT&T unveiled a tiered broadband service in Reno, Nev., on Nov. 1. According to a Friday filing with the Federal Communication Commission, AT&T executives met with the legal adviser to FCC Chairman Kevin Martin to discuss “usage-based pricing” as a form of network management. AT&T has hinted that this was coming for the last few months. From the filing:

In particular, AT&T plans to initiate a broadband Internet access usage trial in Reno, Nev., beginning in November. Consistent with AT&T’s belief that consumers should have clear information about the capabilities of their broadband Internet access services and any meaningful limitations on those service,  AT&T will be providing written notice to customers involved in the trial explaining that their broadband service will be subject to a certain monthly usage tier for the total amount of data they may send and receive, as well as a per gigabyte charge in the event they exceed the usage tier.

AT&T says it will have tiers ranging from 20 GB per month to 150 GB per month with a $1 per-gigabyte overage fee for new customers. Later this year, existing AT&T High-Speed Internet customers in Reno will become a part of this trial if their monthly usage exceeds 150 GB in one month. These customers will receive a usage amount of 150 GB per month.

Time Warner’s caps start at 5 GB per month and stop at 40 GB per month. Frontier’s also start at 5 GB per month, and last week Frontier’s CEO said the company would also offer larger tiers. The filing states that AT&T will also offer customers a meter to show them how much bandwidth they have consumed, which is more than Comcast (with its 250 GB cap) or even Time Warner have offered.  AT&T also plans to notify customers when they reach the 80 percent threshold of their tiered plan. Only after the second instance of breaking through the set cap, will customers be charged on a per-gigabyte basis.

This plan sounds much more generous than those of Time Warner (which is the primary competitor to AT&T in my neck of the woods), but we’re still against limiting broadband use. Especially when faced with the stark statement at the end of the filing, “Finally, in the event a new or existing customer does not want to participate in the trial, we will permit the customer to cancel their broadband Internet access service without an early termination penalty.” Wow, looks like it’s tiered broadband or no broadband.

Want to catch up on metered broadband? Check out these links:

10 Things to Know and Hate About Metered Broadband

Time Warner Talks Last Mile & Bandwidth Caps

Why Metered Broadband Is Bad for Microsoft, Google & Us

Why Tiered Broadband Is the Enemy of Innovation