At 02:15 PM 15-10-96 -0400, Avi Freedman wrote:
..., IMHO, you really need PPP.
We run PPP on all non-frame-or-smds and less-than-DS3 links so that the customer (or ourselves, if it came to it) could switch to non- Cisco gear instantly.
But we usually leave most cisco-cisco high-speed links at HDLC. My impression is that HDLC was the same efficiency - or moderately more so - than PPP.
There are about three flavors of HDLC encapsulation, one of which is cisco and because of that the others don't matter. There is precious little difference between all the flavors of HDLC and PPP, they all carry the old OUI/Ethertype/etc overhead. And the efficiencies of all are the same compared to SMDS or ATM.
For what do feel that one *really* needs PPP?
Well, that's it -- I don't assume that the whole world is cisco, but I'm a bit naive. Of course there are other hooks in PPP that are useful, since PPP, like BGP, is a Swiss Army knife protocol, but again since the whole world is cisco, let BGP figure everything out and run HDLC. You don't really need PPP in an all cisco backbone. But I like PPP because cisco still doesn't document their HDLC line protocol. :-) (Go ahead, try to find it online or ask someone on one of the tech support lists to find it for you. :-) --Kent I'm kidding. Of course I love everything about cisco, since as Dave O'Leary has told me for a long time "Sooner or later everyone ends up working for cisco" and he seems to be right.