 pflogBueller? Bueller?Premium,MVM
join:2001-09-01
El Dorado Hills, CA
kudos:3 | reply to cdru
Re: Anyone sucessfully switched from PPPoE to DHCP? said by cdru:With DHCP, you have an explicit lease that expires at a regular interval. With PPPoE, it's assigned to your connection. Now the connection may be closed (either forcibly by the ISP or via a network/hardware failure) but as long as your router stays connected you'll usually stick with the same address. I just rebooted my router several times and the newly established PPPoE connection each time always grabbed the same IP address. In my experience, reconnecting a PPPoE session meant a new IP address EVERY time. If Verizon is doing something differently or they have a larger IP address pool then I could see getting the same IP address. If the PPPoE server dies, guess what? You not only lose your connection, you lose your IP address. If a DHCP server goes down, chances are you wouldn't even notice unless it was an extended outage and the leases database typically survives a restart of the DHCP server (at least the software DHCP servers I know of).
Well, this is the Verizon forum, not the AT&T. Verizon will screw up your billing, but you'll get a reliable connection. Apparently AT&T might be able to get the billing straight, can't figure out the connection part. Perhaps the two companies should merge or something. 
Seriously though, yes it is an additional point of failure. But any ISP, especially of Verizon or AT&T's size should have high availability/redundancy in their systems. If they don't, then it's not a failure of the technology but rather of the specific implementation. Specifically with Verizon FiOS, I don't think I've ever had a PPPoE related issue since being one of the early adopters of FiOS. Well apparently AT&T/SBC did not (do not?) utilize any sort of redundancy or live fail over because when the PPPoE server went tits up, you knew it immediately 
Prior to resetting my router just now, my existing IP address was 11 days old and that was just as far back as my logs went. Yes it's not static, but it's also not very dynamic either. Whether your address is changing every couple days or every couple of month, the thing is that under either scenario, the address has change. Neither offers guaranteed static addressing and the address could change at any time if there was a major issue somewhere in the network. I think you'll have a hard time convincing anyone who has used both DHCP and PPPoE that they have similar IP address retention. Far from it.
If you need to authenticate via IP address, neither technology is perfect for 100% "uptime" authenticating. If you just need pseudo-static addressing without needing to actually pay for it, either technology with Verizon (both with DSL and FiOS) will work from my experience without issue. If you need to contact your machine remotely, use one of the dynamic dns services out there...the changes either way are infrequent enough to cause not too many problems. I think the OP would beg to differ. He's obviously wanting to move from PPPoE to DHCP for a reason. Yes of course it's not static, but it does provide more stability as far as how long you keep an IP address.
Me personally, I would not want to go through the red tape. I trust Verizon to keep my connection operating as long as I don't make major changes. Switching from PPPoE to DHCP or anything that contains the works "rebuild", "connection", or "account" is like playing russian roulette with billing. If the existing connection is stable and you aren't having problems, I don't think the gains justify the risks. But if you are having problems, can live without an internet connection for a day (or possibly a week [or two]), or you feel lucky, then go for it.
I wouldn't suggest the OP do it either. If Verizon had their sh*t together, they could do the conversion much more quickly and the OP wouldn't have had to start this thread. 
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He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have. -Socrates |
