Setting Up PPPoE Connection in Linux
Broadband access and Next Generation Networks (NGN) conception became part of everyday life. According to Parks Associates the number of households worldwide with broadband is approaching to 500 million and it may reach close to 650 million by 2013. The demand for speed of data transferring always increases, just as the amount of users who are connected by means Ethernet, which allows them to connect to the network with the speed up to 10Gb/sec.
Internet Service Providers (ISP) that provide users with Ethernet-channel generally use the following technologies for user authentication and billing:
- User account binding to the physical line, for example, using MAC-address of the network interface. Linux user has to configure network interfaces to establish such a connection;
- VPN-technologies allowing user authentication and secure connection. For example, PPTP, L2TP or IpSec;
- PPPoE (Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet) which this article is about.
PPPoE represents a network protocol for encapsulating Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) frames inside Ethernet frames. PPPoE expands the capability of PPP allowing a virtual Point-to-Point connection over a multipoint Ethernet network architecture. Given protocol was published by IETF in 1999 and its specification is RFC 2516.
In fact PPPoE does not have important advantages in comparison to the above mentioned alternatives. However the following ones can be emphasized:
- It’s significantly more secure than MAC-binding and allows user to change network interfaces connected to the provider without appealing to provider’s customer support; still it slightly reduces the bandwidth of the network interface;
- Its configuration is simpler that the one of VPN-connection and requires less parameters to be introduced by user. In particular there is no need to configure IP-address or to specify the address of VPN-server.
Thus, most likely you will encounter PPPoE just because you ISP will provide the Internet via this technology. Although provider’s technical support generally can help you just with Windows, you can easily connect your PC with Linux operating system following our instructions.