| gabriel rosenkoetter on Mon, 25 Mar 2002 22:50:28 +0100 |
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On Mon, Mar 25, 2002 at 04:05:08PM -0500, Jon Galt wrote: > Thanks Gabriel, that is an interesting article. I don't see anything > about limitations of PPPoE in it. Well, of course not. What's not technical in there is marketing fluff. (Red Back was trying to sell PPPoE as better than other xDSL methods.) :^> (Fwiw, I don't have any problems with PPPoE. Never have.) > My objection to PPPoE is very minor. It just seems strange to me that I > have to "log in" to a so-called "always on" connection. And with a static > IP, at that! In a previous location I had cable modem (without a > staticIP), and there was no requirement for me to log in at all. The > cable modem just re-established a connection and got a new IP whenever the > power was cycled. I just plugged my router into it, and there I was, on > the internet. Don't you have to "log on" to a Windows network? Or, for that matter, to any properly secured (read, IPSec) WAN? Why not log on to a network connection? It makes complete sense to me, and is the point of including the PPP at all. Also, ISPs already have structures in place for metering and billing based on PPP logs. Letting them use PPP on their end makes the transition to DSL easier, which is a good thing (and a major point in Red Back's article). Some may not like the fact that ISPs can bill by the minute (even though none that I know of DO, mind you). Those people should consider the fact that this ability makes offering DSL more appetizing for the ISPs involved. It's a good thing, really. Also, Red Back stresses in a couple of places that they're proposing PPPoE as a *crossover* protocol, eventually to be replaced by something more appropriate to the medium. That time just hasn't quite come yet. There're always growing pains. Trust me, you would all be bitching WAY more about having to deal with ATM to get your DSL than you are about dealing with PPPoE. ATM is not Ethernet as you know it. > Regarding the ease of use of PPPoE mentioned in the article, I must say > that I found it rather easy because my Linksys router has built into it > the ability to talk to the ISP via PPPoE. Yep. And as I've been saying for months, the failing of Verizon is not that they use PPPoE (almost every domestic DSL provider does), but that they don't provide you with a DSL modem with enough smarts to talk PPPoE itself. > Since I run a web server (which Earthlink has no problem with), I run a > cron job to make sure that if for some reason the connection goes away, it > gets reestablished This doesn't happen often. Interesting. That's not necessary on my Speakeasy connection. (That is, there's no PPP timeout with Speakeasy service.) > By the way, the article used PVC several times. What does it mean? Uh, plastic pipe? Beats me. I hadn't yet read that article in detail when I sent the suggestion that everyone ought to actually know what they were talking about. I'd just skimmed it and seen that it explained the reasoning behind PPPoE (which was a major point of uneducated speculation here). -- gabriel rosenkoetter gr@eclipsed.net Attachment:
pgpy75sIbploh.pgp
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