Muni fiber: L1 or L2?

Wed Feb 6 23:18:05 UTC 2013

On 13-02-06 18:11, Scott Helms wrote:

> I'd agree.  Its a better way of doing L2 unbundling than PPPoE.  Its just
> PPPoE had the sharing concept baked into it so it was easy for most
> operators to use historically.

PPPoE has its roots in the dialup days. So Incumbents were more than
happy to be able to use existing radius servers to autenticate DSL
customers.

And PPPoE dates from a time when ethernet "routing" didn't really exist.
With current ethernet technologies such as VLANs and ethernet
encapsulation, if someone is looking at building something from scratch
(such as a minicipal network), there shouldn't be incentive to adopt
older technologies that provide less flexibility.

If you provide L2 ethernet service, it doesn't prevent an ISP from
providing PPPoE over it.