SBC Wants To Switch DSL Format To PPPoE

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."

Comments

SWB: PPPoE for Basic, straight E-net for Premium

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

pppoe isn't that bad

[egomaniac]

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.