FIG. 17 is an exemplary flow chart for a protocol that may be implemented to communicate between the gateway 1610 and the network operation center 610 shown in FIG. 16A. The gateway 1610 may connect to the tunnel interface module 1630 in the network operations center (NOC) 610 using a TCP tunnel (step 1710) and provide to the tunnel interface mode 1630 a virtual IP address and shared secret to aut