FCC Just Repealed Net Neutrality
“The FCC voted 3-2 Thursday to repeal net neutrality rules, ending Obama-era regulations that prohibited Internet providers from blocking or slowing web content.
Whereas all Internet traffic previously shared same ‘lane,’ it can now be split among different lanes with different speeds.
Those differing speeds could hurt telemedicine since it requires a ‘pretty robust connection,’ said Mei Kwong, interim executive director and policy advisor for the Center for Connected Health Policy. ‘The last thing you want is for the interaction to suddenly freeze or the audio to go out or for the picture to be pixelated.'” Modern Healthcare
The health care industry usually signs a contract with the carrier to guarantee services, its called an SLA. That SLA determines speeds, latency, jitter and is filled with penalties for missing those items. The real losers are going to be us, we are best effort customers.
And if the patient is not on, or cannot access, the exact same carrier (or maybe even a special compatible “plan” as defined in 700 pages of bumf that no one can comprehend), then what? Let the fun and games and extortion begin.
The corporate whining was about the burdensomeness of “regulations.” However, the anger this sort of thing will engender will lead to regs an order of magnitude or two more complex and burdensome than we have yet seen. Expect an impenetrable, virtually endless, process to determine which which packets get actual service, and which ones just get sent to go hang in that great bit-bucket in the sky.
Actually this site (except for the adds) shows how to avoid the issue, if you stick with a text only web site then the bandwidth demand can be low enough that dial up would still work for example. It is only when you stream video, that heavy bandwidth demands come up. So since the main issue is that folks like netflix and indeed Amazon video are now in competition with the cable ISP’s that will be the big impact. It will become difficult to start the ultimate new streaming movie and tv service.
lyle:
I believe medical had a larger usage in mind beyond text.