Now that the FCC and our President has cleared the way to destroy Net neutrality what will happen to our cloud? I ask this as breaking this rule will allow providers to throttle Internet speed, and create Internet Fast Lanes for pay. How do you all feel about this?
Very few IOT devices other than cameras produce enough traffic to be impacted by this. It’s primarily going to affect streaming video. It may affect where you watch Game of Thrones, but it’s not likely to affect where you route your light switch commands.
I’m not saying it’s not an important issue, just that it’s not likely to be an IOT issue for now.
3 Likes
Net Neutrality bias wouldn’t be limited to voluminous traffic by technology, carriers could, for example, limit or block all IOT Traffic, all Samsung traffic or just SmartThings traffic if not compelled to not do so by law or regulation.
Who knows what would actually be implemented, going to depend upon what consumers let them get away with and how they can benefit from such biases.
I guess we have to wait and see for now.
2 Likes
The obvious example concern here is that both AT&T and Comcast have add-on smart home products & services (eg. Xfinity Home) and I would not put it past them to take advantage of the opportunity to exploit this.
2 Likes
That is what I was thinking. I read somewhere that competing services could be affected, but we have to wait and see.
1 Like
Only time will tell how this plays out. This is certainly a bad move for the consumer, however I also don’t think the carriers will immediately do anything out of fear of customer reprisal. What I expect to happen is that the current tiers of service plans will evolve over time into a “fast lane” concept where there are effectively 2 or more classes of traffic. We will see carriers advertising with meaningless boasts of high speeds and unlimited usage caps for preferred content partners (i.e. companies who grease the palms of ISPs) whereas the rest of the internet traffic will be relegate a slower speed, capped quota. We are already seeing a hint of things to come with wireless carriers right now.
But don’t worry, somehow corporate America will somehow figure out how to spin this in a way that a large amount of the populous will be convinced this is a good thing for them.
1 Like
I’m personally very concerned about this on many levels. What’s most concerning is that there is little to no competition in most areas, so switching carriers may not be much of an option to force change. 
4 Likes
I wouldn’t be surprised if speed is tied into some kind of bundling. So in order to get the fastest speed, you’ll need to have their phone and TV service as well. Right now we have Cable for Broadband service and DirecTV(AT&T) for Phone and TV.
In a way that is already happening. In my bundle I got 50 with the package for a much lower price than the 25.
1 Like
Nothing will happen for a while, but eventually it’s possible that Comcast might start to “slow down” competitor’s camera’s, to incentivize their customer’s to use their system or to incentivize their competitors to pay them so their system will work.