e complete management to the service provider (thus achieving the typical managed services model) or self-manage via tools provided by the service provider (thus achieving the typi- cal cloud services model). These three NFoD principles provide the much-needed flexibility and operational simplicity for enterprise networking use-cases. While moving functions to the cloud is an obvious trend in the industry, there is still a need to support functions at the customer premise location. To address this need, a new open hardware platform that is capable of running any function that exists in VNF software library, was created-this is the uCPE. 10.7 UNIVERSAL CPE The uCPE is an open hardware platform that is capable of running different types of virtualized functions at the customer premise. Think of the uCPE as a small extension of the AIC that runs network functions and also directly integrates with the AIC. So if a customer requires some func- tions to run locally at the premise it is run on the uCPE, while it may make sense to run the other functions in the AIC. The service will service chain the premise into the AIC to provide a seamless service. Before we talk about the services that can be enabled at the customer premise, we have to talk about the uCPE hardware platform on which these services run. The uCPE is a generic hardware platform built with commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components. The platform will run Open Source software for the base system functions and allow VNFs to run as services on top, in the same manner as services that run on a cloud platform. Figure 10.15 outlines the uCPE architecture. The goal is to create a generic and open hardware platform using cheap commodity components to drive down cost, continue to maintain performance, and add cloud-like flexibility for network services. The initial release of uCPE will focus on an Intel-based x86 platform but the uCPE architecture does not dictate it has to be Intel-based. The uCPE architecture could run on other hardware in the future (such as AR