Bandwidth-sipping IoT steers clear of net neutrality debate -- for now

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.