What is a PPPoE Termination unit?
PPPoE Termination units (also known as Access Concentrators (AC), Broadband Management Servers (BMS), and Broadband Residential Access Servers (BRAS)) answer the PPPoE request coming from a client site PPPoE application (such as WinPoET). After the PPPoE process (Involving a PADI, PADO, PADR and PADS) there is PPP negotiation and Radius authentication. Once all this is complete the subscriber can now surf the Internet through their service providers network.

What PPPoE Termination Server should we use?
Contact us with your specifications and we can correctly determine which PPPoE Termination Server would best suit your needs. Typically a solution like ServPoET from Fine Point Technologiesis what we recommend.

Why Recommend ServPoET from Fine Point Technologies?
Today's service providers and carriers are very limited by the expenses of expanding their broadband networks to support new service offerings and reducing costs. These challenges can be met by simply offloading the resource intensive PPP over Ethernet (PPPoE) processing from the Edge Routers and Access Concentrators. Many of these routers lose about 10 fold their performance the minute PPPoE is enabled on those devices. This limits the network from it's original capacity, let's say 10,000 subscribers, to about 1,000. With the cost of those devices it's just not feasible to build out a network to accept more subscribers. With a product like ServPoET the cost per subscriber can go from 12 dollars per user on a router to as low as 3 dollars per user with ServPoET.

The ServPoET™ Broadband Management Server (BMS) platform provides the industry-leading family of PPPoE subscriber management products that offload and terminate PPPoE sessions for all types of broadband service at nearly 1/4 the cost and 3x the performance. The ServPoET BMS™ platform offers carriers and service providers worldwide a solution for aggregating and managing broadband PPPoE subscribers and value-added services.

Are their cheap PPPoE Access Concentrators on the market?
There are inexpensive options on the market. Our test findings have found some interesting information though on the two inexpensive options on the market though. Using some of these solutions for PPPoE can cause a problem depending on the amount of subscriber sessions it's terminating, as well as the original RP-PPPoE (which is in StarOS as well as general Linux Distros). Both devices are not cut out for commercial applications and die out on CPU quite quickly when processing bandwidth due to the data processing being done in user space.

For example if you had 100 customers in one of these devices with gigabit ethernet interfaces (a tried and tested example) the throughput is cut to less than 400 mbps, and this is with no other protocols or features enabled on the OS, literally just PPPoE. With 250 subscribers the throughput drops to under 300 mbps, before 100 CPU utilization and this is on a 2.4 GHz server.

Now I realize this all depends on the size of your network and if you are doing centralized termination or termination at the access point, but with centralized PPPoE termination and any other features on the unit most real world experience is major issues at more than 100 subscribers.

What can I do with a PPPoE Server?
You could offer tiered levels of service.
For Example:
Different levels of Speed can be set by userid in a product like ServPoET. Maybe you want to charge your users by the hour or minute You could also charge your users by the "byte"

Some PPPoE Termination Systems, like ServPoET, offer the ability to roll out Dynamic Service Selection. This option allows you to set up different services and allows customers the ability to log in to them if you've set that up in your profile. With software like WinPoET, for example the customer can be shown that services are available for them to access (of course you'd want to charge them for use of these services).