A lot of people in the circles where I run view their Internet service as a dumb pipe from their house to the Internet, regardless of who provides it, and if the provider (be it a Telco, a Cableco, a FiberCo, or other) provides specialized equipment in order to use the service, they view that equipment as a nuisance. I don't know if there is a good way to quantify this market, but it would be accurate to suggest that it accounts for over half of the people I personally know, who would prefer that their network provider simply dump a gigabit Ethernet jack in their living room or wiring closet and leave the choice between a $30 router, a $300 one, and a pfsense box to them.
Regardless of the fact that I personally know so many people in this situation, I don't really think it's very common, and I suspect a really common subset is people who would let the service provider have a bigger hand in their connection if they were either providing better equipment or if letting the provider have that control introduced other benefits, such as receiving voice and video services on the wire, in addition to just data.
Today, there are three large telcos in the United States and each offers fairly different services as their successor to plain old DSL and PSTN telephone services over regular switched copper networks.
The first telco has started ripping up their copper and replacing it end to end with fiber. (Actually, they have all done a certain amount of this, but one of them in particular is building marketing around it.) They offer data, voice, and video over this pipe, and you can get those services in any combination. The voice information terminates at the side of your house where the fiber does, and as such isn't packaged as part of the network service. You can order voice on this network without ordering data or video. This provider views the data pipe as a dumb data pipe and if you do not have video services, you're under no obligation to use their equipment. You can choose which router you use, or to simply connect a single computer directly to the service, and no special provisioning is required.
The second telco has started installing fiber to nodes around neighborhoods and is offering primarily single and pair-bonded VDSL2 lines. They still offer traditional PSTN voice service over the copper wires and in most of their markets, do not offer video services. In most markets where it's available, the video services are also delivered via VDSL2, even if it means quad-bonding, or using two pair-bonded gateways, one for video and one for data. This telco will lease your device if you want, that may even be the default, but they are also happy to sell you the gateway and let you switch it into pure modem mode, so you can use your own router on their network. You may also buy your own compatible gateway free of the provider's markings and firmware and use that. They will happily tell you what standards to look for. When you first establish service, or when you buy a new gateway on this network, you must either know your authentication details or put your phone number and other account details into a wizard.
The third Telco is both deploying fibers directly to houses, and to nodes with VDSL, ADSL2+ and VDSL2 copper lines radiating from the neighborhood nodes. Which technology you're on depends on the overarching market conditions, and includes consideration as to whether this telco wants to optimize for reach or speed. This telco has decided that the voice service it sells is not only going to be a Voice over IP service, but that the gateway for that service is going to be part of the gateway they provide data network access on. If you have voice service from them, or are just unlucky, they will absolutely refuse to sell you your gateway, and their modern network is considered closed. You may not buy a third party device from a commodity gadget retailer and use it to connect to their network. When your gateway breaks and you need a new one, you call in for service and they send you another device, pre-provisioned with your account information, and you only need to sign into your account once it is connected.
The differences between these two strategies is quite interesting. In this situation, I consider the third telco to be of the most interest, as they seem to view their services as being integrated and inseparable from one another, and the hardware that they provide as being the physical embodiment not only of their services, but of them, in your home. This may or may not be surprising, but this is the telco I mentioned last week, with concepts like a whole-home bonded VDSL/2 gateway sitting at the demarc, using HPNA to connect the larger gateway to smaller wired/wireless LAN nodes, and also had the hilariously large gateway.
I didn't talk very heavily to this point in the previous post, but I continue to think that the idea of installing the bonded, vectoring-aware VDSL2 modem at the demarc (thus avoiding some of the potential pitfalls of in-home wiring) and then using one technology or another to install wireless access points (with the same settings, naturally, for wireless client roaming) and switches wherever you need them in your home is actually a good idea. I think a better implementation of this today would have the gateway be given very powerful computing guts to handle network infrastructure tasks, and the internal home phone and cable wiring replaced with cat6 twisted pair wiring, so the customer can install wireless access points or desktop switches at any given point. (The nerd's version of this is hiding the gateway in a basement/attic/garage/rack/office/closet and then running Ethernet everywhere on their own.) The main problem with that, I suppose, rather than just dropping a single gateway in the living room between the TV, computer desk, and phone is that it requires a fair amount of effort.
On the other hand, we're talking about the telco unwilling to let customers have control over their network by excluding RFC1483 bridging from the firmware of their gateways and making DMZ mode unreliable and difficult to configure. The signal I get from this is that they should be willing to expend effort wherever possible to manage the network for their customers, and in my mind, the implication is that they see the customers' site as an extension of their own network.
One of the drawbacks is none of the services or hardware they offer and use involves anything truly creative. For example, it would be really interesting if their gateway had a big ol' hard disk or two in it and their service software included a personal computer backup application, or if you could use that storage area to show your own content on your TV via their settop box. Even more exciting would be if you could use it as a sort of miniature hosting area, so you could tell people to go to a special web address with that information. There are plenty of third parties who have services and devices, but integrating it at the telco level could be really interesting.
To be honest, it sometimes surprises me that ISPs at large haven't dumped hard disks into customer-premises equipment such as DSL gateways. There are a number of potential uses, including using it to deliver video a client personal computer, additional storage for digital video recorders, a cache for customer mailboxes, or as a cache to other services, such as an ISP provided FTP archive, a portal or other web application, or some kind of distributed storage system. That isn't even addressing local uses, such as storing customers' voicemail on the device and using it for PC backups. Because customers aren't using their connections at 100% all of the time, because this telco seems interested in providing more value added services, because passing data to and from their customers should be "free" for them, and simply because they can and it would actually provide some value for some of their customers, it's interesting to see that they haven't.
Because of my personal interest in coalescing services into a single box, I would totally be interested in seeing what such a piece of equipment would look like and how an ISP would deploy it in the real world. Unfortunately, I suspect that the way I would do it and the way it would get done in the aforementioned real world wouldn't match up at all.
I can think of some neat uses that are probably consistent with most of what the ISPs would like to do with their networks, but which may violate some net neutrality principles. If I were designing such a gateway, it would probably be something with as much of TECT's functionality as possible, even if for a smaller scale. A local SharePoint site could be good for coordinating house things, especially in a "roommates" situation. Exchange and Lync could host the house's e-mail and phones, and could also be used to aggregate e-mail from other accounts, via POP or IMAP. In addition, a local media server or storage area for PC backups, document storage, etc is always appreciated.
Whether or not this ISP will ever take the service to its logical conclusion is not known. It's likely they won't, because at some point many of its customers who would prefer to be on another network (but will can't) will froth with rage. Unfortunately, they do not sell a plainer service in areas where they've rolled out the new service, and the United States is not set up in such a way that every customer can reasonably choose a competing network.