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At some point hitherto, Patrick R. McManus hath spake thusly:
> There's a little too much verizon bashing going on in this thread
> without any first hand stories. While I was skeptical going in, I
> actually have this service and have been satisfied with it.

There have been a great many first-hand stories on this list in the
past, some quite detailed.  While I do not remember any of the
specifics (my memory controller is broken and I desperately need a RAM
upgrade), I do recall that enough people had negative things to say
about V's DSL service that I became convinced I never wanted to have
it.  Undoubtedly, searching through the archives will reveal plenty of
first-hand stories, if you care to find them.  Repeating them is
largely a waste of the list's time...  It hasn't been all that long
since the last time this discussion came up.  It comes up pretty
frequently, as people experience no end of frustration with whichever
phone company (Verizon, AT&T, Covad, RCN...) they are dealing with
today.  About the only sure thing one can conclude is that all phone
companies suck.  It's only a matter of finding the one that sucks the
least for your particular needs.

> I know the conventional wisdom is to diss PPPoE but I can only think
> of one technical reason to dislike it - IP fragmentation. This can be
> sovled by just turning down the MTU on any home LAN links you might
> have.

...to the detriment of your local LAN's performance.  Thanks, but no
thanks.  This doesn't solve any problem; it only creates a new one.
Essentially you're causing your local LAN to fragment packets.  That's
not actually what's happening, but the effect is almost the same:
smaller packets means a smaller data to frame header ratio.  IOW when
you decrease the size of your frames, you must now have more of them
for the same amount of data.  The data in each of those frames must be
encapsulated by an ethernet header.  Thus more headers, less data.
Your systems must now spend relatively more time processing headers.

And while I am not familiar with the arguments, several of my very
technical friends bitch about PPPoE on a fairly regular basis.
Perhaps one of them will pipe up and say why...  Some of them are on
this list.

- -- 
Derek Martin               ddm@pizzashack.org    
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