what to do with the pppoe virus?

PPPoE never leaves where it enters. Introduces 1/200 transfer and some computational overhead, which is much if the router can't offload it and encapsulation cannot be done in parallel.

What's the worst is all of the Elite-5 ISPs, Zen, Aquiss, AAISP, Trunk Networks, Cerberus use PPPoE. I would expect those smaller ISPs to have considered the advantages of DHCP and switched to it, nevertheless I know only TalkTalk and Sky who don't use PPPoE. I can't understand this because I would expect these smaller companies whose customers are more technical to react.

One advantage of PPPoE is, assuming that the ISP allows multiple PPPoE sessions, one can use PPPoE passthrough to bypass NAT and optionally use DMZ. So there's no harm in keeping PPPoE optional but I don't think it's worth it. You can try setting up PPPoE on all your computers for improved performance to see to what extent it complicates things.

</rant>

So what we can do against this? Would "saynotopppoe.co.uk" that names and shames those ISPs work? I guess that'd be more efficient than a change.org listing. What do you think?

My suspicion is that the vast majority of the country don't care and only very techy people would bother to get at all worried about what encapsulation the ISP is using.

In reply to a post by ian72:

My suspicion is that the vast majority of the country don't care and only very techy people would bother to get at all worried about what encapsulation the ISP is using.

I agree that it would be lovely if PPPoE went away, but I suspect most of the <0.5% of the population who want to get rid of it also know how to work around/with it and have the resources to do so.

In reply to a post by weelan:

What's the worst is all of the Elite-5 ISPs, Zen, Aquiss, AAISP, Trunk Networks, Cerberus use PPPoE. I would expect those smaller ISPs to have considered the advantages of DHCP and switched to it, nevertheless I know only TalkTalk and Sky who don't use PPPoE.

A good first port of call is to understand why these guys use PPPoE or not. TalkTalk and Sky use their own networks in every site they provide FTTC/P so no need to aggregate together tons of connections in a BRAS. The 'Elite-5' all make extensive use of BT Wholesale. BT Wholesale in turn use PPP. These smaller companies' more technical customers may well understand this.

Just FYI TalkTalk Business, the TalkTalk wholesale operation, also uses PPP. I would assume there are valid technical reasons for this and, again, more sophisticated customers may understand some of these.

There are 4,094 VLANs maximum. Openreach hand traffic to providers via SVLANs with CVLANs inside them. Providers have to do some quite creative stuff from here rewriting VLAN tags to bundle customers back into VLANs and deliver them to the ISPs they serve. BT Wholesale handle millions of end users via PPP and L2TP. Be quite a challenge dropping all that in favour of straight Ethernet.

The counter point is that low cost hardware is available that can handle a gigabit with PPPoE, and with baby jumbo support there's no fragmentation overhead associated with it. So if you know enough to know that PPPoE can cause problems you also likely know enough to make them a non-issue.

In reply to a post by weelan:

So what we can do against this? Would "saynotopppoe.co.uk" that names and shames those ISPs work?

No, because nobody cares. You might as well campaign for "say no to IPv6" because the headers are 20 bytes larger than IPv4.

I have PPPoE. It works fine. It's just 8 bytes of header, which is insignificant both in bandwidth and processing. I enable baby jumbos so I still get a 1500 end-to-end MTU.

For business connections it's much easier to assign /32 static IPs with PPPoE than with DHCP, avoiding a /31 or /30 link network which would burn more IPs.

Another benefit of PPPoE is keepalives. I can tell within a few seconds if my PPPoE connection has gone down, even if the layer 1 connection to the ONT is still up.

The only argument I can see to drop PPPoE is to provide 'greener' broadband. PPP requires an ASIC or a beefy CPU to maintain a PPP tunnel at gigabit (and beyond) speeds which is both expensive and power hungry.

So if Openreach provided a transparent L2 bridge between customer and ISP, the only CPE required is the ONT. This is easily possible nowadays and doesn't require even VPLS let alone VLANs.

The ISP in turn can turn off their very power hungry LNS concentrator, thus removing 2 boxes from the national infrastructure and saving quite a lot of power and plastic and provide their customer with whatever they want over that L2 network.

In reply to a post by zzing123:

The only argument I can see to drop PPPoE is to provide 'greener' broadband. PPP requires an ASIC or a beefy CPU to maintain a PPP tunnel at gigabit (and beyond) speeds which is both expensive and power hungry.

No it doesn't. Inserting or removing 8 bytes in a packet doesn't require an ASIC. Plenty of routers without ASICs can handle PPPoE at gigabit.

So if Openreach provided a transparent L2 bridge between customer and ISP, the only CPE required is the ONT.

The user will still need a CPE to perform routing functions, including NAT.

Or are you saying that the ISP should be doing NAT at their side? That would require something far more complex than a simple BRAS/LNS, as it would need to be stateful. You've replaced a BRAS with a CGN device. Oh, and it has to do stateful DHCP to track every single device within the customer's own LAN. And it has to be configurable (by the user) for inbound port forwarding.

In any case, the user would still need a layer 2 device, i.e. a switch and/or wireless access point, to plug into the ONT, simply to allow multiple devices to share the link. So they end up with a different type of CPE. As far as 99% of users are concerned, it's just a box where they connect things. They have no idea whether it's a layer 2 or layer 3 box.

In reply to a post by zzing123:

The only argument I can see to drop PPPoE is to provide 'greener' broadband. PPP requires an ASIC or a beefy CPU to maintain a PPP tunnel at gigabit (and beyond) speeds which is both expensive and power hungry.

So if Openreach provided a transparent L2 bridge between customer and ISP, the only CPE required is the ONT. This is easily possible nowadays and doesn't require even VPLS let alone VLANs.

The ISP in turn can turn off their very power hungry LNS concentrator, thus removing 2 boxes from the national infrastructure and saving quite a lot of power and plastic and provide their customer with whatever they want over that L2 network.

Openreach provide a layer 2 link between end user and the CP. This requires VLANs. Stacked VLANs usually, SVLAN and CVLAN. Without any VLAN usage how did you have in mind Openreach knowing how to reach each CP? Without VLANs or some other encapsulation how did you have in mind CPs separating out customers?

There is also the small matter that an ISP needs to have a link to every Openreach OLT/L2S if there's no encapsulation happening anywhere. Most ISPs can't afford this, it's time consuming, and that's why no-one sells from every CityFibre FEX. ISPs are waiting for their national product.

If you've solutions for these I'd welcome them, as your post carried a fair bit of confidence in the statements. Thanks!

In reply to a post by candlerb:

No it doesn't. Inserting or removing 8 bytes in a packet doesn't require an ASIC. Plenty of routers without ASICs can handle PPPoE at gigabit.

Name one 1gbps ISP-supplied CPE router that can physically push 1gbps randomised traffic at full MTU that doesn't use PPP hardware acceleration or a big CPU that takes a lot of power.

In any case, you need a processor to do PPP. I'm just saying remove that entirely... Just taking BT by example: A BT Smart Hub may not be super high power at 14W. But multiply that by the 14 million customers BT have, and that's 196 MW of power being used that's unnecessary. If using FTTP, there's another 12W being used by the ONT...

In reply to a post by candlerb:

The user will still need a CPE to perform routing functions, including NAT.

Look my post above was just trying to find one benefit to dropping PPPoE - the power usage scenario. You and I'd be mad not to have routing at each site as we care about managing our data and the sanctity, privacy and security of our LANs because we have a clue what we're doing.

But for the sake of argument, if you removed the CPE and 'extend the LAN' across Openreach to an isolated VPLS-like broadcast domain controlled by the ISP, there's no reason the ISP can't provide the DHCP and NAT their end hosted centrally with no need for any plastic rubbish at home. It'd also make life a lot simpler for ISPs supporting Grandma too as they'd have a full view of the LAN for diagnosis.

Given that ISPs practically force people to use ISP-supplied routers and take pride in managing customer's Wi-Fi the entire premise of NAT, the notion of LAN security and privacy is actually completely moot anyway. But this is all value-add you and I don't need. I'd prefer to pay for a simpler, cheaper service without any of that stuff.

The ONT is a Layer 2 device - it's essentially just a 2-port switch with one RJ45 and one PON port...