JD wrote:
There seem to be pros and cons to both directions. Certainly true bridging has less overhead. But modern CPEs can minimize the impact of PPPoE. PPPoE allows for more flexible provisioning; including via RADIUS. Useful for the call center turning customers on/off without NOC help. But VLAN tricks can sometimes do many of the same things.
Call your vendor and demand better radius backend support for dhcp. :) The largest fallback to PPPoE is the CPE needing to terminate the PPPoE or the customer's router/computer/etc needing to do so. This can be a pain especially in business environments. I have one section of my network (maintained by counterpart, not me) that is 90% PPPoE/A. The other 10% is bridge due to customer needs and CPE limitations. I personally run all my stuff as bridge, including all the CPEs.
BTW, I doubt it is relevant to the discussion, but most of our DSLAMS are Adtran TA5000s (or are being migrated to that platform.) We are mostly a cisco shop for the upstream routers.
I have been extremely happy with unnumbered vlans in the cisco work for terminating mass vlans from dslams that support 802.1ad. The fact that it works right next to RBE works great for me. The current IPv6 layouts aren't as pretty for this setup, though. Jack