Stephen Lawson

The US military might have to share its radar frequencies with mobile broadband providers under a plan the Federal Communications Commission continued to flesh out under the name Citizens Broadband Radio Service.

The proposed rules could allow sharing a wide band of spectrum spanning 3550MHz to 3700MHz. Parts of that spectrum are home to high-powered military radar, especially within 200 miles of US coastlines, which is also home to a majority of the country's population.

To prevent interference, the FCC calls for using a dynamic database to keep track of where and when the frequencies can be used.

Plans to favor some Internet packets over others threaten consumers' hard-won right to use encryption, says Sascha Meinrath, director of X-Lab, a digital civil-rights think tank.

Encrypted traffic can't be given special treatment because it can't be identified, said Meinrath. That could eliminate a major revenue source for ISPs, giving them a strong reason to oppose the use of encrypted services and potentially an indirect way to degrade their performance, he said. Because of the way network discrimination could affect encrypted services, guaranteeing Net neutrality will be critical to ensuring consumers' right to privacy online,

Meinrath wrote with policy activist Sean Vitka in Critical Studies in Media Communication. Both authors of the study also call for regulators to keep control of communications in the hands of users and in their own devices at the edge of networks, giving consumers the power to encrypt their communications from end to end.

If you're worried about an Internet "fast lane" squeezing out all the futuristic connected devices you're hoping to use around your home, fear not.

The vaunted Internet of Things, which already includes a variety of industrial sensors and machines and a growing number of consumer devices, is likely to make itself more at home in the coming years. Some such devices, like the connected refrigerator, are still more curiosity than useful tool. But others are playing important roles in health care and home security, taking advantage of always-on broadband connections to keep people and machines elsewhere informed in real time.

The question of IoT and net neutrality is likely to revolve mostly around connected devices that use home broadband connections. However, people involved in the IoT device and services business said they don't see a need for priority traffic handling now, and it hasn't been a hot topic in the industry. Even if consumers' broadband speeds were affected by a paid-priority scheme, it probably wouldn't get bad enough to hurt IoT, said Tom Lee, co-founder of IoT cloud provider Ayla Networks.

"If it's good enough to satisfy most Netflix consumers, it almost automatically satisfies the needs of the IoT things," Lee said. But if providers of connected-health services are allowed to pay for priority, they probably will, Steve Hilton of IoT consultancy Machnation said. And though there may be objections to it, prioritizing those narrow streams of traffic probably wouldn't affect anything else consumers are trying to do, he said.