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SBC Wants To Switch DSL Format To PPPoE

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the bleah dept.

Mr. Haplo writes: "Looks like SBC's at it again. According to this story, SBC wants to change everyone's DSL connection to PPPoE. The article goes on to say that the California Public Utilities Commission and the ISP Association are filing complaints against SBC and PacBell over this. It doesn't mention anything about SDSL connections, however, so I don't know what they'll do, if anything, about them. They do say that business services would be left alone, though, so I assume this means just about any SDSL services (I hope!). Someone needs to take a baseball bat to SBC's executives."

10 of 326 comments (clear)

  1. Grow up by Stephenaa · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Could you guys perhaps use an hour or so reading up on PPP, ATM, DSL technologies and the different issues an ISP will have to tackle in order to provide you with your beloved bandwidth? PPPoE isnt bad, PPPoE doesnt prohibit static IP. DHCP is not comparable with PPPoE. The comparison would have to be between PPPoE (over AAL5) (or PPP over AAL5) and IP over AAL5 the RFC1483 way. Compare the tree and decide what you would implement if you were to make money in that buisness and had to plan for 100.000+ customers. The only real viable solution is PPPoE over AAL5.

    1. Re:Grow up by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      "The ISP needs it in order for the book keeping of traffic, accounts and in some contrys security. In a DSL setup the ISP has no other mean of matching a user to a connection."

      OK they have a MAC address of the customers NIC, lincard port address and in some cases can add a small piece of hardware that uniquely tags the traffic. All are largely transparent to the user. Note I've barely scratched the surface in pointing out how they can and do. You still have not mentioned how PPPoE is good for users over any of these methods.

      "You need authentication for the ISP to be able only to give service to their registered customers."

      Wrong. Without the line card setup you are not going to plug a DSL modem into the network and get line sync let alone internet connectivity. See you keep shoving PPPoE down our throats yet everything you really need can be done with what we have now. It's kind of funny how you contradict yourself below saying that ISP's could cobble together something when these aspects have been there since day one.

      "1) Why is PPPoE diffenrent from PPPoA or IPoA in this respect? It is just another protocol. If other ISPìs could buy raw ATM channels from their CO to the customer it would be up to ISP #1 to chose which protocol to use. Will SBC allow PPPoE only third party ISPìs?"

      What part didn't you get? We don't need another protocol and if we did, why not a service that just authenticates and then is done? We don't need PPPoE. Third party ISP's will only have the option of using PPPoE for consumer level access. Why because the incumbant says look at our access technology (PPPoE)you want to offer competitive service price wise you have to use it. That means they have no choice not an additional one.

      "2) Capped - in what sense do you mean?"

      Speed is capped at the modem line card level. If one of the advantages of PPPoE is switching providers easily, it's important to note that PPPoE will not allow you to pick a faster provider and have your modem sync up to that providers service. To use a slightly flawed modem analogy say one provider offered only 28.8k access but unlimited minutes and the other 56.6k access but only for 340 minutes a month. So you subscribe for both. Trouble is PPPoE does not offer this option because it's independent of the modem. So to those advocates of easy provider switching are only covering half the story.

      "3) No, but he(or she) might want a cable from one operator and IP service from another in cases where proper cable coverage is only available from one cable operator. "

      This is DSL not cable. Cable has the DOCISS standard in hardware for authentication that is surprise surprise transparent to the user. If you were speaking about internet access and different providers wanting different routing, that's possible as well.

      "4) In a free contry a company is free to put together the product it markets. If the company wantìs to differentiate between two market segments it is free to do so. The same fredom applies to you - you can buy the buisness product if you want the better performance or the higher geek-factor."

      You are assuming facts not in evidence. One Telco's own wires and infrastructure that they can and sometimes do leverage to keep the little guys out of the DSL arena. This is far from a free market. Try regulated monopoly. Second PPPoE is the crippling of a product that worked fine before. A) Is the internet connection under PPPoE always on? NO. B) No more waiting to connect. No that advantage is gone too. C) Standards based access? Nope PPPoE is a niche informational protocol supported by hardware vendors like Redback (see their informational RFC) that want to sell hardware to ISP's that have an existing dial up modem infrastructure. At one point redback wanted to charge a license per user connected through their access concentrating SMS (Subscriber Management Systems). This is the broadband market, times change, they should too. Third why as a consumer must I buy a business product to get ratified standards based connectivity? This isn't elite geek-factor it's about getting a stable useable connection. You know what they promise. Just because it's supported under Linux doesn't mean that it's acceptable that we and non telco owned incumbent ISP's should be forced into using it. That's what's happening with the SBC PPPoE introduction. Especially when more elegant (no overhead on every packet), structurally sound (less points of failure) exist now and are being used instead of PPPoE in the market now.

  2. can I post? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    this is just a test. please ignore

  3. Re:Humor me.... by Joe+Decker · · Score: 2, Insightful
    but it seems to me that customers benefit from not being identifiable by a static IP...

    Can't speak for you, but I don't consider it a benefit to not be able to host a web server at a static IP, I don't consider it a benefit to have to buy a new router to hook up "non-standard" machines, and I don't consider it a benefit to lose my ability to run a decent VPN into my home systems. I am not a business, and having my existing systems broken out from under me would p' me off big time....

    ...had I not been battered enough by PacHell's incompetency with ISDN a few years back to figure out that my DSL provider should be someone clueful, like speakeasy.

    I cop to feeling smug.

    --j

    --
    I'm a nature photographer.
  4. Bellsouth by kireK · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I'm with Bellsouth, and get PPPeO. Other than a few problems with the Ethernet out of the box it wirks. I get a new IP every 24 hours... and no chance of static IP. I wish I could get an "enhanced" service for $65 a month, and get a bridged service with a small segment (/29 maybe). For SBC folks that are complaining... it could be worse.

  5. SWB: PPPoE for Basic, straight E-net for Premium by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful
    I just became a SWB DSL customer (it's a lot cheaper than ISDN, which I'll be turning off soon). Their "basic" ($49.95) service does PPPoE; their "advanced" ($64.95) gives you plain old Ethernet framing and 5 static IPs. (/29, your router gets the address right below the broadcast address). Oddly, upload speeds were much faster with the Basic service; apparently it's not rate-capped (at least in my area, a newly-wired part of St. Louis), while "advanced" is (I'm paying for 384/128, and getting about 1.5M/170).

    This looks to me like a way for Bell to squeeze ISPs out of their "advanced" market. I suspect that that will then be followed by a price hike. Sigh.

  6. The REAL reason they are making the switch by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Probably has more to do with the fact they figured out that they can make a LOT more money with PPPOE than any other access method...

    Don't expect to see your setup times go down, either, cause that DSL system is still running through and ATM network :)

    Check it! Money Making Hardware for SBC

  7. pppoe isn't that bad by egomaniac · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I have a Linksys router (Etherfast Cable/DSL) which makes it pretty seamless. When I first try to pull up a web page, it takes a few seconds as the router connects, and then after that it's fine. That's all there is to it.

    I would absolutely despise PPPOE if I had to manually initiate a connection every time I wanted to do something, but having your router connect on demand for your entire home network mostly eliminates the pain.

    --
    ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
  8. Re:It doesn't matter to me... by RasputinAXP · · Score: 2, Insightful
    *weeds through the non-formatted paragraph*

    Static IP's are not "easier" than DHCP. DHCP is "plug me in and get on." You don't have to set anything up.

    With my 4-port Linksys router, I serve DHCP behind the PPPoE connection. My friend who brings a laptop over can drop a CAT5 cable into the router and be online, even enabling such silly things as file sharing. And that's even if they bring a computer over.

    Quite frankly, how many of us are going to unplug our own personal machines to let a friend plug in a laptop. Those of us that get into that situation frequently buy things like ROUTERS. We've already discussed this. DHCP behind NAT and all.

    Now, do I think they've made my service cheaper? No. That's just plain stupid. The things I expect are uptime and bandwidth. I get both. It's no disservice to me to run PPPoE because I'm not running a server. Everybody who has DSL to run a personal home server for public consumption that is upset about PPPoE needs to step back and look at what they're doing.

    This is not what residential ADSL is for. Don't get me wrong, I'm all about having access remotely (like when I'm at work). However, I don't publicize the fact that my machine is up and running and connected. That's what those of us in the industry call "stupid."

    Quite simply, if you want a static IP because you're running some type of services, go buy a business account and get your static IP, or go off-site. Dreamhost ain't half bad.

    I have a beef with people that can't format their posts to make them legible.

  9. Re:Another example of selling "Cold Dead Fish" by tjb · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Ok, I'll come clean here: I write DSP firmware for DSL modems. If you want, you can send me an email at thetimdog@hotmail.com and I'll confirm it from my work email (no, I will not give that out on messageboards).

    FEC is, in the strictest sense, mandatory, but it is easy enough to just set the number of redundancy bytes to zero, in which case FEC takes up zero bandwidth. Also, FEC without some interleaving is damn near pointless due to the way impulse noise works and the way DMT is modulated, so when running fast path, there are generaly zero redundancy bytes and no interleaving.

    If you are getting any significant latency to the nexth hop when using fast-path DMT, that is the fault of the provider, not the DSL impelmentation.

    Tim