if you're using services from a wide area network provider or an internet service provider there needs to be a physical location that designates the connection point between the providers network and your internal network we refer to this location as the demarcation point or simply the dmarc this dmarc might be a location that's connected to your home for example you could have a telephone network interface or a similar box that's provided by your internet service provider and that box is the demarcation point if you're in a company there's usually a location inside of the building that's considered the demarcation point usually everyone knows where the dmarc is located and when somebody needs to install a new wide area network connection they're usually sent to the room that we consider to be the d mark the location of this dmarc is important especially when problems are occurring so you can understand whether the problem is on the provider side of the dmarc or whether it's on your side of the dmarc usually if it's on your side you have your own equipment your own routers and it's on your own premises we often refer to this as customer premises equipment or cpe and you'll hear this often referred to as the customer prim this is where you would then connect to your network to do troubleshooting if you can connect to the provider side on the dmarc and perform all of the same tests and still have a problem then you know that the issue is somewhere on the provider side it's obviously much easier for the provider if they don't have to come into your building into a room to the dmarc location to be able to perform this troubleshooting instead they'll put in specialized equipment that they're able to control remotely often this equipment is a smart jack this is technically a network interface unit or niu you'll see these on the wall they'll usually have blinking lights and status lights and they're usually in a locked container with limited access because this is equipment owned by the network provider this is obviously much more intelligent than just having a single rj45 connector this is a powered system that is monitoring and is able to provide diagnostics remotely so the provider can connect to the smart jack run their own tests and determine if the problems that are occurring are something that's in the provider side of the network or if it's something that might be on your side of the network even though you may not have physical access to the smart jack you are able to view the smart jack through these windows and very often you're able to see alarm notifications and other status lights that might help you understand more about the connectivity that you have to that wide area network provider you