[alduin32]

So I work mostly with fiber, which is a bit different than DOCSIS in terms of demarcation and interoperability, but at least with fiber, these economies of scale in management can also be realized without having this unified management platform, although it can indeed impact the revenue stream. I work at an ISP where LAN management is an add-on option (that most users take), and so we maintain this uniformity :

- unmanaged clients ("power users") get an ONT that is very easy to monitor remotely, and we never had a situation where they were unable to setup a DHCP client

- managed clients pay a bit more and get an AP/router that they cannot directly configure, except for things like the wifi password and some NAT mappings.

It would not make sense to price it this way if we were selling data about their home network, and I suppose that's part of the reason other big ISPs here prohibit their users from connecting to the ONT directly.