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"We will throttle," Ivan Seidenberg said April 6 in New York http://bit.ly/bTf10h. "The problem we have is 5 (percent) or 10 percent of the people." Moderator Alan Murray saw right away what that meant.

"MURRAY: It's video, right? I mean, it's video.
SEIDENBERG: But those are the people we will throttle."

Currently only 5-10% of mobile users watch a substantial amount of video, mostly at low bit rates. Ivan is therefore  saying he needs to "throttle" anyone watching much video, which will soon be far more than 10%.

Could this be Ivan's "they are not going to use our pipes" moment that ignited the battles in D.C? Every lobbyist in D.C., including Ivan's own, is shouting net neutrality is unnecessary because none of the carriers will do anything like throttling most video.  Comcast has demonstrated that even on cable very, very few users take enough bandwidth to be any issue. "Far less than 1%," Comcast's Jason Livingood recently told D.C. With almost no traffic intervention, Comcast's bandwidth costs are so low (about $1/month/customer) they tell Wall Street they have 80% margins on cable modem service. Everyone technical knows the "congestion problems" are wildly overstated

and the networks designed to handle all but truly extreme loads. Even AT&T is rapidly fixing their iPhone problems, which Group President Stankey now recognizes were due to AT&T cutting investment in their network for several years.

Verizon's landline networks can handle much more traffic than cable because they aren't shared. CEO Lowell McAdam of Verizon Wireless recently confirmed they have enough capacity to handle iPhone loads without trouble. The new LTE networks will have ten times the capacity within three years and cost 70+% less per gigabyte carried. Wireless has limits, but they are so far above current usage on a decent network these just aren't big issues. Certainly not enough to suggest throttling all customers who regularly watch video.

Ivan made a stunning faux pas. CEOs hate saying "I made a mistake," but the facts are clear. Verizon has to hope the D.C. reporters don't follow up the story, but this one is too good to pass up.

I read everything Ivan says closely because he's one of the best in the business. We all make mistakes. There are several more stories in the interview, at the Council on Foreign Relations, http://bit.ly/bTf10h Here's the section.

The problem we have is 5 (percent) or 10 percent of the people are the abusers that are chewing up all the bandwidth. That's what happened with music and all that kind of thing.

So what we will do is put in reasonable data plans, and we've done this. We've just introduced a $30 data plan that does with every one of our BlackBerrys or smart phones, a 10 (dollar) or a $30 data plan that covers the majority of people who feel that's a fair price. I get to use it for 30, 40 hours and I pay a certain rate.

But when we now go after the very, very high users, the ones who camp on the network all day long every day doing things that -- who knows what they're doing -- those are the --

MURRAY: It's video, right? I mean, it's video.

SEIDENBERG: But those are the people we will throttle and we will find them and we will charge them something else.

Now, the dilemma we have is that government will come in and say well, I'm not sure we want you to do that.