Just before Mobile World Congress, more than 100 members of the European Parliament had signed an open letter, urging the European Union to toughen its stance on net neutrality and clarify its definitions. But the trend for governments on both sides of the Atlantic to take strong positions on neutrality, as seen in the most recent FCC proposals, will be quickly outdated by the internet of things (IoT), some operators are warning.
At MWC, Vodafone CEO Vittorio Colao, warned that many of the services consumers most want – such as health monitoring, driverless cars, and even ubiquitous wireless access – would be impossible under the neutrality regimes envisaged by the FCC and EU.
“Those services can’t be implemented in a net-neutrality environment,” Colao said during his keynote address. “Customers favor non-discrimination, but they also want services and technologies that enable a new future of employment.”
His counterpart at Deutsche Telekom, Tim Hoettges, echoed the thought in his own speech, saying: “We’re in favor of net neutrality, but what happens when you’re in a driverless car and someone listens to Spotify? The car should be prioritized based on bandwidth needs. You need quality classes to enable the internet of things.”
Of course, the real world implications for the IoT will only really be known after plenty of test cases are brought to test the precise definitions, but some players fear that the uncertainty will encourage the continued build-out of proprietary networks for applications which rely on absolute QoS, rather than moving services like emergency response to the public LTE platforms.