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I'm trying to grasp why L2TP is based on PPP. I thought PPP was a protocol for point-to-point situations where you don't have Ethernet. So why/how is L2TP using PPP in order to establish communication between a Windows 10 client pc and a router that acts as a L2TP server? The whole path between the client pc and the router is ethernet based.

Wouldn't L2TP have to be based on PPPoE instead in such scenarios?

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PPP is independent of the underlying transport, PPPoE requires to be run on Ethernet (or a like tunnel). But of course, you can also run L2TP with PPPoE (RFC 3817).

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  • Ok that makes sense. But is "regular" PPP over Ethernet the same as PPPoE? In other words, is PPPoE just another name for running PPP over Ethernet or is it something else?
    – rigor
    Aug 15, 2017 at 16:05
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    PPP is basically designed for serial connections. PPPoE modifies this basic concept to encapsulate PPP frames into Ethernet frames and use MAC addressing.
    – Zac67 ♦
    Aug 15, 2017 at 16:15
  • Thanks! These answers cleared a lot of things up for me :-)
    – rigor
    Aug 15, 2017 at 16:42

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