Hi The Meraki ethos and product portfolio is ideally suited to delivering solutions to domestic deployment. Many problems may be rectified without physical service calls, children's mobile devices may be configured and managed along with on-line usage monitoring, CCTV deployment and use is simple, telephone systems (no mobile signal, use a DID and an app on the mobile devices) can be seamlessly integrated, a number of silent devices which are mandatory in domestic and professional office deployments. There is a lot that is great. But what's not to like? Home environments are often stuffed with "smart" IoT-style kit that is abysmal as far as security goes, so it belongs on a VLAN of its own. It is easy enough to set this up, but sometimes even getting Chromecast to function when the streaming device is on a different VLAN to the mobile device attempting to set up the stream is impossible. Having Bonjour enabled did not help, although there are some superficial similarities in the two systems and the underlying protocols they rely upon. Also, unfortunately, the MXs are not so keen on all the various flavours of multicast that are used by many multiplay ISPs and content providers. So an inability to handle a significant number of premium TV subscription services is telling. Sticking another router ahead of the MX to pass the TV feed directly to the switch (which is IGMPv3 capable) is a clumsy solution to the problem. It is very noticeable that budget-priced router manufacturers in East Asia have no difficulty in handling this type of multicast. When google sent me the ports and protocols used by Chromecast, what immediately stood out was the use of multicast . . . The consequences are that deployment in domestic situations is unnecessarily complicated and not capable of remote management. Further, there are a number of major telcos that are also managed services providers, whilst they are attracted to idea of Meraki based solutions, they will not become pervasive until a Meraki solution embraces all the products in their multiplay packages. No voice, no TV streaming are show stoppers. So back to the subject of this post, what do the gnomes use at home? Has it never occurred to anybody to put their smart devides on a separate VLAN? Don't they use multicast subscription TV? How about using the telephones in most of the world? It seems that some opportunities are being missed, by all means be sceptical about domestic deployment, but the managed services market as addressed by major telcos is significant. I would have thought if enough gnomes decided to mine the orc's gold themselves, all problems would disappear.
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