Redefining what is meant by quality of customer premises equipment

Traditionally, quality of customer premises equipment (CPE) has meant conformance and reliability, while quality of after sales services has meant lowest downtime period. It is argued here that, although these definitions may be adequate when CPE buyers use their communications facilities as internal technical utilities, they are unsuitable when they use them as business resources to create value for customers. The trends likely to prevail well into the twenty-first century are expected to exert pressure to define CPE quality in terms of conformance to buyers' business strategies and outmode the concept of quality as conformance to technical specifications developed by quality assurance groups. Five main implications of this change for quality managers are identified.< >