Re: PPPoE vs. Bridged ADSL

[Jack Bates <jbates () brightok net>]

JD wrote:
> There seem to be pros and cons to both directions. Certainly true 
> bridging has less overhead. But modern CPEs can minimize the impact of 
> PPPoE. PPPoE allows for more flexible provisioning; including via 
> RADIUS. Useful for the call center turning customers on/off without NOC 
> help. But VLAN tricks can sometimes do many of the same things.

Call your vendor and demand better radius backend support for dhcp. :)

The largest fallback to PPPoE is the CPE needing to terminate the PPPoE 
or the customer's router/computer/etc needing to do so. This can be a 
pain especially in business environments. I have one section of my 
network (maintained by counterpart, not me) that is 90% PPPoE/A. The 
other 10% is bridge due to customer needs and CPE limitations.

I personally run all my stuff as bridge, including all the CPEs.

> BTW, I doubt it is relevant to the discussion, but most of our DSLAMS 
> are Adtran TA5000s (or are being migrated to that platform.) We are 
> mostly a cisco shop for the upstream routers.

I have been extremely happy with unnumbered vlans in the cisco work for 
terminating mass vlans from dslams that support 802.1ad. The fact that 
it works right next to RBE works great for me. The current IPv6 layouts 
aren't as pretty for this setup, though.

Jack