SDSL CPE business model

In order to understand the existing SDSL CPE, one has to first understand the business model on which it is based.

Businesses stay in business by selling products or services which customers like and pay for — hence the saying that the customer is always right. In order to stay in business, most companies have to make their products likable by their customers and users — the general assumption is that the customer is the user and that the two terms are interchangeable.

The situation is markedly different in the case of SDSL CPE however. In the traditional SDSL CPE business model the end user of the CPE product, the one who has to endure and suffer its features, is not the customer, he is an involuntary subject for torture. Instead the customer and thus the only one whose satisfaction the CPE manufacturers care about is the ISP.

With traditional Internet services, be they cheap dialup or expensive leased lines, the subscriber had to provide his own CPE, the hand-off interface was based on open standards and CPE manufacturers would compete for the user's business. The business model adopted for SDSL however, is that the end user never buys or chooses his own CPE, it is always shoved with the service. Since the user never buys their CPE on his own free will, SDSL CPE manufacturers need not care about user satisfaction. Instead all they need to do is to make a backroom deal with the major ISPs to adopt their CPE, and then their sales are guaranteed with a lineup of involuntary customers.

The manufacturers of most SDSL CPE described here were not even set up for direct sales to end users. When was the last time you saw an SDSL router in a store next to the ADSL ones? In fact the lack of any semblance of a standard for SDSL and the proliferation of wildly different flavors makes it virtually impossible to market SDSL CPE to end users. How would an average user or even someone who is an experienced network administrator but not a total SDSL nut like me figure out which CPE version or configuration to choose?