Will Dismantling Net Neutrality Affect IoT?
It’s a pretty sure bet that soon net neutrality will cease being the law of the land for at least the next four to eight years if not forever. While ISPs give the impression that it’s only big bandwidth users — companies streaming movies, music or handling VoIP calls — that will be affected, that won’t necessarily be the case. The effect of a wholesale elimination of net neutrality would, in effect, be a deregulation that would hand providers the ability to throttle traffic at will.
There are some who are questioning whether this should be a concern to those in the burgeoning Internet of Things market. At first glance, it would seem not. After all, most IoT devices produce only spoonfuls of data compared with the buckets associated with Netflix, Hulu or Amazon Prime. The trouble is, IoT generally requires low latency. In many cases, a delay of seconds becomes problematic and one of minutes becomes game ending. Therein lies the rub. The ISPs might see this as a potential new revenue stream. Read more…