Re: Review of draft-bberry-pppoe-credit (Informational)
Karl Fox <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.ietf.pppext |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
On Aug 1, 2005, at 12:45 PM, James Carlson wrote: > Mark Lanzo writes: >> On 27 Jul, Vernon Schryver wrote: >>> Which raises my question of what PPPoE has to do with the solution >>> and my point that PPP(oE) is widely misunderstood as other than a >>> link layer protocol. Why use PPPoE to link networks instead of IP? >> >> The proposal *is* using PPPoE as the link layer. If anything, more >> than PPPoE is normally used as such. > > That doesn't answer the "why" question. IP runs fine over Ethernet. > >> The whole point is that you have a router and an external radio. >> The radio has an ethernet port on it, by which it attaches to the >> router. The radio itself detects other radios in its vicinity, >> and creates a semblance of a serial connection to each of those >> adjacent radios. The customer wants the router to run PPP on these >> serial connections. > > It's that "semblance" that I think is a problem here. Jim, I think you just hit the nail on the head--why does the customer want to simulate a serial connection? And as you and Vernon have both asked, why interpose this troublesome serial emulation (which is ITSELF the source of the need for flow control) in the middle of a packet networking stack when the real service to the end user is packet delivery and the radios are themselves packet delivery devices? Let me speculate: Is it because the customers are ISPs who started out with serial modems carrying PPP, and who now are so ossified by their legacy serial-centric back office systems that they want every new technology to look exactly like a serial modem? Or is there a real technical need that I haven't grasped yet? Karl _______________________________________________ Pppext mailing list [email protected] https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/pppext