Taking Public Networks to the Next Level

I have Comcast/Xfinity in my residence in the USA and was thinking about how they deliver service. For my home router and Wifi I use Cisco Meraki. Because Meraki supports BYOD technology I can identify different devices connecting at home and set restrictions by device. This is extremely useful for my children that want to live on the net. By setting the restrictions by device i can control what and when they access the internet. I can also, by device, include them in multi-point VPN's for my work and other locations. 

I was thinking about other folks that aren't as tech savvy, how can they manage this? Your basic CPE from Comcast is not going to deliver that functionality easily, and adding VPN functionality or integrating other services into the home Wifi requires other equipment voice services from the CPE are minimal. 

I have built a few greenfield networks (national networks in Honduras in 2005) and we included the CPE's in the cost of building the network and we were delivering Voice, Data links and Internet. So we used CPE's capable of delivering 3 MPLS services and with the ability to deliver FSO ports in the quantities needed by our clients. This was expensive. But at the end of the day we had built a pure metro ethernet solution delivering wire-speed service to all our customers.

Today with the advent of "Cloud Managed Equipment" again we could deliver another level of service to customers by using these types of CPE's in the network delivering device by device policies that are easily managed on a smartphone. Schools could integrate their network services securely to the students home including voice and video. Integrating home/office would be managed easily. It would add another level of service to the ISP's today that seem to be falling short in the service department.

I know the core of the network is critical and in order the deliver service the access and WAN is vital but sometimes I think we miss the target on where the class of services needs to be and that is where the customer is using the service at the demarkation point. With a properly designed CPE for today's internet users we can deliver a new class of service that customers can manage with an app on their mobile device that opens them to new ways of controlling how families and businesses access's voice, data (VPN) and Internet services.