Five years ago this week… Alcatel was the first out the gate, claiming that its virtualized home gateway plan was ready to take the broadband market by storm, with live implementations expected in early 2016. The company argued that applying network function virtualization (NFV) to the home gateway could reduce operational costs for ISPs by up to 40%, although this was more like 25% for premium services. Based on the Broadband Forum’s Network Enhanced Residential Gateway (NERG) initiative, the basic idea was for the home router to become a home bridge, with routing, management, troubleshooting, QoS controls and policy all migrating to the cloud. This raised questions as to which CPE manufacturer would be willing to marginalize its profits in…