FCC report lays out what cable's been saying all along; bandwidth hogs rule the Internet

The latest technical paper developed and released by the FCC seems to contradict the agency's own beliefs about net neutrality. FCC Technical Paper No. 4 pointed out that about 1 percent of residential users consumed about 25 percent of all online traffic, making them the "data hogs" service providers are trying to throttle.

"The extreme difference between average and median data usage is principally due to a relatively small number of users who consume very large amounts of data each month--sometimes terabytes per month," the paper said. "The most data-intensive 1% of residential consumers appear to account for roughly 25% of all traffic; the top 3% consume 40%; the top 10% consume 70% and the top 20% of users consume 80% of all data."

If it wasn't an official FCC paper, one would almost think it had been paid for by the cable industry.

Despite the findings, the push for net neutrality goes on. Four Democratic House members, Ed Markey (Mass.), Anna Eshoo (Calif.), Mike Doyle (Pa.) and Jay Inslee (Wash.) sent a letter to the FCC decrying a Google (Nasdaq: GOOG)-Verizon (NYSE: VZ) compromise.

No private interest should be permitted to carve up the Internet to suit its own purposes," the elected ones' statement said. "Net neutrality is about preserving the open Internet and empowering consumers and small businesses to bring the next generation of entrepreneurial drive to the World Wide Web."

For more:
- see this technical paper (PDF)
- and this story

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