History
The two phrases, "customer-premises equipment" and "customer-provided equipment", reflect the history of this equipment.
Under the Bell System monopoly in the United States (post Communications Act of 1934), the Bell System owned the phones, and one could not attach one's own devices to the network, or even attach anything to the phones (a popular saying was "Ma Bell has you by the calls"). Thus phones were property of the Bell System, located on customers' premises – hence, customer-premises equipment. In the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) proceeding the Second Computer Inquiry, the FCC ruled that telecommunications carriers could no longer bundle CPE with telecommunications service, uncoupling the market power of the telecommunications service monopoly from the CPE market, and creating a competitive CPE market.
With the gradual breakup of the Bell monopoly, starting with Hush-A-Phone v. United States, which allowed some non-Bell owned equipment to be connected to the network (a process called interconnection), equipment on customers' premises became increasingly owned by customers, not the telco. Indeed, one eventually became able to purchase one's own phone – hence, customer-provided equipment.
In the Pay TV industry many operators and service providers offer subscribers a set-top box with which to receive video services, in return for a monthly fee. As offerings have evolved to include multiple services operators have increasingly given consumers the opportunity to rent additional devices like access modems, internet gateways and video extenders that enable them to access multiple services, and distribute them to a range of Consumer Electronics devices around the home.
Read more about this topic: Customer-premises Equipment
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Like their personal lives, women’s history is fragmented, interrupted; a shadow history of human beings whose existence has been shaped by the efforts and the demands of others.”
—Elizabeth Janeway (b. 1913)
“The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“In history an additional result is commonly produced by human actions beyond that which they aim at and obtain—that which they immediately recognize and desire. They gratify their own interest; but something further is thereby accomplished, latent in the actions in question, though not present to their consciousness, and not included in their design.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)