Net neutrality issues will re-emerge with IoT: MEI

The growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) will force a new perspective on net neutrality and zero-rating, a report from the Montreal Economic Institute argues. “The development of the Internet of Things will bring to the fore a whole new set of situations in which it may be necessary to treat customers, devices, applications or platforms differently,” the report, released Wednesday, said. Authors Martin Masse and Paul Beaudry said that some prioritizing “will have to happen in order to ensure the robustness and security of certain connections.” This includes questions about how to treat different kinds of information, such as a platform monitoring various machines in a manufacturing plant, or an ehealth system that millions of patients depend on. For instance, they asked, how “should a data packet sending crucial information about the position of a self-driving car be treated, compared with another one sending a cat video?” Telecom researcher Ben Klass said in an email Wednesday that questions around how the current rules apply to such services are likely to emerge in the future. However, he noted that the framework recently established by the CRTC on differential pricing practices, which banned most zero-rating, excluded managed services, such as IPTV or voice-over-LTE (VoLTE). Klass, whose 2013 complaint against a mobile TV service kick-started the debate over zero-rating in Canada, said Wednesday the CRTC “will have a look at those things eventually, including whether they trigger the existing framework, or require an update.” He added that in excluding managed services, the CRTC “has left room for carriers to experiment with new types of services, and in future challenges where ‘managed services’ are the focus, the basics that have already been established — restrictions on throttling for wholesale and retail, no content-specific zero rating for retail — will be left standing.” Josh Tabish, campaign director for advocacy group OpenMedia, said in an email that prioritization wouldn’t be necessary if there was a “robust quality of service regime that ensures data is actually being delivered at the speeds and rates advertised by the provider.” Currently, telecoms deliver “up to” an advertised top speed, while in a system with minimum guarantees for speeds, as well metrics like latency and jitter, “there's no need to prioritize one set of traffic over the other because there is a reasonable guarantee that everything will be delivered at the speed promised by the provider.” Under such a system, there would be no need to prioritize ehealth or self-driving car data over other traffic, Tabish added. Masse and Beaudry also argued in the report that the emergence of IoT will lead telecoms to shift focus away from the individual consumer, and that as IoT grows, “the debate of the past decade over telecommunications services, prices, and levels of competition are likely to become gradually less relevant as this new technological paradigm comes to dominate the sector.” For instance, only facilities-based carriers will be able to manage their networks in order to meet the needs of IoT devices, meaning that if the CRTC and government continue policies that support smaller providers that buy wholesale service, “they may well slow down the development of the IoT and harm the Canadian economy,” they said. — With reporting by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca and editing by Charelle Evelyn at cevelyn@thewirereport.ca

Net neutrality issues will re-emerge with IoT: MEI

News | May 3, 2017

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Net neutrality issues will re-emerge with IoT: MEI

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