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PPPoE is pretty much only used for DSL in the US. I'm not sure about elsewhere.
Xfinity and AT&T Fiber do /not/ use PPPoE. Xfinity is built on DOCSIS, and AT&T Fiber is built on XGSPON. This means neither one relies on PPPoE at the data link layer. XGSPON uses XGEM/XGTC at data link layer, DOCSIS uses MAC (same data link protocol as Ethernet).
This article is making a bunch of assertions which are just patently false. PPPoE is basically old hat at this point. It's extremely high overhead anyway, so is only used for DSL because DSL is an old approach.
> Even in 2026, a huge number of ISPs still rely on PPPoE, including Bell Canada, AT&T Fiber, and Xfinity in the US, along with the vast majority of ISPs in Europe, Asia, and China.
A lot of people dunk on PPPoE, but it does have one redeeming feature: failover is a lot easier and faster compared to IPoE. With IPoE you often rely on vendor-proprietary mechanisms. The closest thing to a common standard is packet-triggered sessions. Normally, BNG's set up sessions using DHCP but you can rig it to do a RADIUS request for a non-DHCP packet without a known session. In this case, it will send the source IP as the radius username, rather than the configured value (this usually comes from dhcp option 82 which includes the customer-id and circuit-id). In an access network, the source address is usually untrusted so instead you would want to have your BNG attach the NAS-Port-Id to the request (which usually contains the SVLAN and CVLAN).
As I noted in my other comment, AT&T Fiber doesn't actually using PPPoE, but anyway, glad to see you linked pon.wiki here. I am running XGSPON ONU stick (ONU on SFP) with the community firmware for my AT&T Fiber connection, getting native 5gbit throughput without the AT&T device in the path. pon.wiki is an amazing resource.
Pulling AT&T's RG out of the loop goes back to the 2018 BGW210 cert-extraction days - 802.1x instead of PPPoE gatekeeping the line. Same fight as DSL bridge-mode workarounds two decades before that. Config outlives whatever the telco claims it's for.
Yeah, half-bridge just gets PPPoE termination onto UDM/UXG hardware offload path instead of software. Worth checking if your model actually supports HW offload for PPPoE though, some don't and you're stuck on CPU regardless of bridge mode.
I always suspected this was possible but having it demonstrated is excellent. I would assume this would be of most benefit on an OpenWRT box which _does_ support hardware offload!
The UCG Fiber numbers make the case: this is a SoC acceleration gap, not a PPPoE overhead problem. Half-bridge is a workaround for hardware Ubiquiti shipped.
I mean at this point just ditch the Unifi? You have a much more capable gateway in play now that needs to have equal to greater throughput than the one you are bridging for.
No, the half-bridge is less capable for various functions, but happens to have hardware PPPoE offload which makes it faster for this specific function but not for others
Curious if UDM Pro's own CPU could hit similar throughput if UniFi just added hardware PPPoE offload themselves. Feels like this workaround exists because Ubiquiti hasn't prioritized it, not because the box is fundamentally underpowered.
There is really so much failure in this post: crappy vendor, misunderstanding how PPP actually works (it requires no addressing at all), using "half bridge" (idiot term) instead of just using it properly. I swear people are even less informed than 20 years ago, it's very sad.
PPP itself needs no addressing, sure, but half-bridge exists because the ISP's PPPoE session still terminates somewhere and you often want a real router doing NAT behind it. Calling that "idiot" ignores why vendors built the feature.
"Half-bridge" nags me every time, term always sounded like router just forwards public IP to LAN box, which... yeah, is what it does. Not really "half" of anything, just bridge mode with PPPoE termination moved. Still works great though.
Xfinity and AT&T Fiber do /not/ use PPPoE. Xfinity is built on DOCSIS, and AT&T Fiber is built on XGSPON. This means neither one relies on PPPoE at the data link layer. XGSPON uses XGEM/XGTC at data link layer, DOCSIS uses MAC (same data link protocol as Ethernet).
This article is making a bunch of assertions which are just patently false. PPPoE is basically old hat at this point. It's extremely high overhead anyway, so is only used for DSL because DSL is an old approach.