Broadband Subscriber Management

Fri Apr 24 03:55:57 UTC 2009

I wasn't aware that LECs have the money to provide a DSLAM port per pair. =)
PPPoA/E wasn't invented to prevent DSL sharing (not possible), but was the
result of extending the dial-up approach of PPP with usernames and passwords
to provide end-users IP connectivity.  As Arie mentions in his posting, the
separation of physical link termination and session termination, done in the
dial-up world at the time, lent to setting up DSL in the same manner.

You don't have to read too many commentaries on IRB & RFC 1483 to recognize
that that approach is all that great, either.  

Frank

-----Original Message-----
From: William McCall [mailto:william.mccall at gmail.com] 
Sent: Thursday, April 23, 2009 7:24 AM
To: nanog at nanog.org
Subject: Re: Broadband Subscriber Management

My understanding of the PPPoA/E deal is that SPs (originally) wanted to
prevent some yahoo with a DSL modem from just being able to hook in to
someone's existing DSL connection and using it, so they decided to
implemement PPPoA and require some sort of authentication to prevent this
scenario.

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