[connect-wg] BEREC consultation: contribution

Marco Hogewoning wrote on 12/11/2019 11:27:
> Did somebody take the time and look at the criteria in the draft, do 
> they make sense from an operational perspective? Of course, we can also 
> submit something along the lines of “RIPE community has a strong 
> preference for XYZ”, but to make such a statement on behalf of the 
> community, we probably need a bit more than the few voices we have heard 
> so far.

Marco,

often there isn't a clear divide between who controls or who needs to 
control the CPE.  For example on DSL networks, it's fine for the 
customer to own and have full control of the CPE, but on a DOCSIS 
network it doesn't work like this.  The DOCSIS protocol requires that 
the provider maintains substantial control over the CPE both in order to 
properly manage spectrum utilisation on the cable segment, but also to 
do things like QOS.  I.e. if you buy a 100M downstream/10M upstream 
package, the DS rate limiting is performed by the CMTS, but the 10M 
upstream rate limiting is done by the CPE.  So if the end user were to 
get full control of the CPE in this situation, then they would be able 
to give themselves as much bandwidth as was available, or they could 
sniff the cable segment, or inject malicious frames there, or whatever.

Of course it would be possible to use CPE-owned devices, but the 
provider will still have substantial control.  Also, the provider 
wouldn't necessarily be able to offer the same level of service or 
support, e.g. the ability to log into the modem and start diagnosing 
cable signal problems.

This distinction is not really clear in the BEREC document, and the 
DOCSIS situation indicates that this is a subtle and important issue.

Nick