> The future holds more use cases. Remote surgery, autonomous vehicles etc etc.

Do you really think it would be a good idea to perform something as critical as remote surgery over the internet, where every script kiddy with a botnet might literally be able to kill you by DoSing the hospital?

When the option is between that and a couple of days (or even hours) trek to the nearest hospital, for life threatening conditions then it may well be a lower risk option in some cases.

We shouldn't be afraid of new technologies because they have a risk associated with them. We just need to place that risk in context against the risks of existing solutions that we already live with.

False dichotomy. Dedicated lines such as telephones exist. We could also build new technologies like you suggest, that are separate from the IP internet.

> Dedicated lines such as telephones exist.

In places where it does exist, this wont be the case for long. Telephone lines are facing obsolescence and at first you're going to see them stop being used, and then you're likely to stop seeing structures being built with them.

And in places where it does not already exist, such as lesser developed parts of the world, the only connection available would be a wireless one, where neither a dedicated connection nor transport to a qualified hospital is an option.

Facing obsolescence, yet here we are discussing how much we need exactly that technology that we're going to abandon. And will spend enormous resources trying to band-aid it on top of an infrastructure that was not designed to support it.

I agree with you. I just don't understand why we let technology develop on this curious path tangential to our actual needs.

LTE voice communication is not a very good example, since it is provided by your mobile carrier, even with LTE. It's not an internet service.

I can't see how autonomous vehicles necessarily require any kind of priority access to the network. Remote surgery is a pipe dream - it has been discussed 20 years ago and nobody cares. It's certainly not worth destroying the network just for that.

LTE is a packet switching solution, so without traffic prioritization regular cellular voice calls could easily be trumped by a few heavy torrenters.

LTE is all IP, so thats about as internet as you can possibly get.

With prioritization one could ensure better quality of services also for OTT voip which would certainly be useful.

There will certainly exist more and more services in need of low latency. Why stop innovation in this area by just giving up and saying that no such traffic might exist?

If you read the article there is still strong wording to protect the network as such. It is just that certain services needs lower latency and/or higher reliability. This is nothing new. But with the network nowadays full with 70% video you need to handle it.

> Sorry guys but reality is that on a technical level some packets must be treated as higher priority.

There is nothing about a 'technical level' that implies this. It's all political. Furthermore, it's certainly not up to the service providers: if I find my work is being slowed down by a garrulous teenager on their phone, I'm gonna find a better service that will provide me what I actually pay for.

> The future holds more use cases. Remote surgery, autonomous vehicles etc etc.

This is the main argument Marc Cuban uses to justify his opposition to net neutrality and I think it's nonsense: any critical or life-threatening systems should run on dedicated lines just like they do now.

I think this is what the EU ruling is taking into account as well, this doesn't seem to be about breaking down protections so that some corporations can screw over their customers - as it is in the U.S - but about proper regulation.