Yesterday’s US Supreme Court decision ruling against the Federal Communication Commission’s regulations on network neutrality is a mixed bag for the Internet of Things industry.
Network neutrality is the principle that all internet traffic is treated the same, regardless of its nature or destination.
The FCC rules meant US based Internet Service Providers weren’t allowed to discriminate between different types of services, for instance blocking Netflicks or allowing faster downloads from Amazon.
In the United States network neutrality has been a bone of contention between consumer groups, government regulators and ISPs for over a decade, although it hasn’t been much of an issue outside North America.
For Machine to Machine (M2M) or Internet of Things (IoT) vendors and services there is some attraction in Telcos being able to offer prioritised traffic for mission critical systems.
In applications like supply chain management and public safety, reliability of the connection is essential and something the ‘best effort’ services offered by ISPs are not well suited to.
When networks are overcapacity, say at sporting events or during disasters, being able to shed non critical traffic may be important for emergency services and the devices they may depend upon.
So for IoT and M2M services, network neutrality is not necessarily a good thing.
However there is a downside should network neutrality be overturned, the risk of vendor lock in is high and it’s quite possible to see as situation where, for instance, AT&T enter into an agreement with Google to provide the public network capabilities for Nest home automation devices.
This could see Nest customers suffering a substandard service if they choose another provider.
Internationally the attitude towards network neutrality has been that competition will sort things out, however the IT and telco industries do have a habit of trying to enforce their own monopolies on customers – something we’re currently seeing in the Apple-Google battles over smartphones and connected vehicles.
So it isn’t clear whether network neutrality isn’t a good thing for the M2M sector, however it’s something that’s going to play out as these technologies become more ubiquitous across the economy.