Security
How many business customers will trust Verizon with their network security ?
The business requirements of firewalls and data security will require considerably more than just a simple mux at the customer site.
Verizon has launched the next piece of its seven-year strategy to virtualise its enterprise services, announcing a bunch of multi-vendor virtual security, WAN optimisation, and software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) services. And Friday's launch has an unusual characteristic: it breaks the decades-long practice among telecommunications …
“we evaluated 20 or 30 vendor offerings – to demonstrate what the vendors can do.”
In other words, they dangled the carrot of "we're Verizon, think of all the munneee!" in front of a bunch of vendors, who then (in the form of product presentations) delivered training and consultancy on SDN thinking they were pitching for a big contract. Verizon then told them all to go away, used the knowledge to design their own system, and will now issue RFP's for the crumbs left over.
When you're a small business, this kind of thing hurts.
So for a long time, CPE= Router. But normally a router, well, routes. If it only has a LAN & a WAN interface, it's just forwarding. So replace router with a switch AKA 'NID' and save a chunk of money. Especially as customers are keen on L2VPNs, which is a bit silly if a router's then used to emulate a switch.
Then if customers want to manage their own security, they can use their own edge devices in their network. If they don't, point the LAN/VLAN at a cloud based service. That reduces OAM costs, and can improve security by standardising builds and patches.
As for free consultancy, Verizon's rather huge and wouldn't likely be looking to source many thousands of devices from a small business. It wants one with the support & delivery infrastructure to bang out networks with the minimum of fuss.