Sagemcom - the box in the house nobody chose

Customer premises equipment is the largest category of networking hardware in the world by unit count and the least examined. Almost nobody selects the box on their own wall: an operator chooses it, ships it, configures it remotely and replaces it on its own schedule. The specifications it is built to are the operator’s, which is why the equipment on this timeline that people actually own is usually the equipment they know least about.

That arrangement decides more than it appears to. The gateway is where a household’s network address, wireless channel, firewall behaviour and often its resolver are set, so a very large number of the decisions this site writes about are made once, by a supplier and a carrier together, for millions of homes at a time.

The corporate detail worth recording is ownership. It has been through five successive leveraged buyouts since the carve-out, and throughout them roughly thirty per cent of the capital has been held by its own employees. Most of the carve-outs on this timeline ended with the staff owning nothing, which makes this one worth stating rather than assuming.