Playing the CPE game

Service providers are seeing CPE plays from all sorts of vendors these days – not just traditional "telco" vendors. There’s convergence afoot with the traditional "retail" networking vendors making a move into service provider territory while the "modem" vendors add more and more networking and gateway functionality into their devices.

Every previously consumer-oriented networking vendor we’ve spoken to recently (and that includes all of the big players) has an active strategy for moving into service provider channels in a big way. Whatever broadband angle you look at -  Fiber-to-the-Home, Triple Play, ADSL2+, you name it… - there’s a NETGEAR or a D-Link or a similar competitor with a solution and a sales team in place competing with the traditional vendors.

Now this isn’t entirely a new concept – these vendors have been pursuing the telco market for years. What is different is that many of them are beginning to gain some traction as their solutions provide a balance of low pricing and interesting features that make them a compelling alternative to the traditional providers.

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Service providers are seeing CPE plays from all sorts of vendors these days – not just traditional "telco" vendors. There’s convergence afoot with the traditional "retail" networking vendors making a move into service provider territory while the "modem" vendors add more and more networking and gateway functionality into their devices.

Every previously consumer-oriented networking vendor we’ve spoken to recently (and that includes all of the big players) has an active strategy for moving into service provider channels in a big way. Whatever broadband angle you look at -  Fiber-to-the-Home, Triple Play, ADSL2+, you name it… - there’s a NETGEAR or a D-Link or a similar competitor with a solution and a sales team in place competing with the traditional vendors.

Now this isn’t entirely a new concept – these vendors have been pursuing the telco market for years. What is different is that many of them are beginning to gain some traction as their solutions provide a balance of low pricing and interesting features that make them a compelling alternative to the traditional providers.

A good example of interesting features are the recently announced products from NETGEAR which incorporate Trend Micro’s Home Network Security offering directly into the home router and Wi-Fi CPE (Trend Micro has been making similar announcements with D-Link and ZyXEL as well).

This solution puts a lot of the functionality that broadband consumers need these days –  like parental controls and per-user content blocking – right into the router, with additional PC-based client anti-virus and anti-spyware software as part of the integrated package.

Other security comes from vendor’s Wi-Fi security efforts. For example, NETGEAR’s "touchless" Wi-Fi security software, which uses a browser "hijack" to grab the attention of new users and walks users through the WPA or WEP setup on their router.

"Consumer" networking vendors are even becoming more telco-like with their support of telco management standards. For example, many vendors have or will soon announce support for the DSL Forum’s TR-069 remote CPE WAN management protocol.

None of this "telco-ization" should really come as a surprise, as vendors who play primarily in the Best Buy and Fry's markets in the U.S. often sell substantial numbers of DSL CPE through service providers in Asian and European markets.

At the same time, traditional U.S. telco suppliers aren’t standing still.  In fact, they’ve been adding some of the same gateway features for years now, trying to do more and more to stay ahead of the game. For example, 2Wire has been getting great traction for their gateways with their TR-059 and TR-069 support and zero configuration systems for quite some time. And Netopia just announced a feature-laden set of triple play gateways (the MiAVo family) which combine TR-069 remote manageability, voice- and video-optimized QoS, and new line codes like VDSL2 in a product that looks particularly compelling from a hardware, software and integration standpoint.