What is Multichassis Multilink PPP?

MultiChassis multilink PPP is an expansion of Multilink PPP that allows the PPP protocol to spread across computers. The Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) is designed to allow a computer to communicate with another computer over one specified port and connection. Many Internet Service Providers (ISPs) use this type of connection for their dial up customers to establish a connection.

Multilink PPP allows for the computer to combine multiple ports to increase the bandwidth of a connection. For example, if a computer could combine two connections to the network at 10Mbps each, the total bandwidth available to that computer would be 20Mbps.

This is the same concept used in Multichassis Multilink PPP except that the multilink connections can be spread across computer hardware. This allows an ISP to better leverage the power of the computers in their data center because the operation can function over multiple PCs rather than just within a single PC.

A dial up PPP connection using multipoint will use more bandwidth than the same dial up connection using PPP. The service or computers this dial up connection goes to are likely to employ Multichassis Multilink PPP because more computers will be used in controlling the connection, reducing the likelihood of a single point of failure.

The connection is still a point to point connection, meaning that if the modem or connecting device on either end of the link goes down or offline, the connection will be broken. Multichassis Multilink PPP is simply a way to manage the PPP connections available.

Another example with a dial up ISP would be its modem pool. The ISP may publish one dial up number for a community, when customers call the number to connect the access servers that authenticate and control the connection will likely manage the connection with some configuration of servers configured for multilink PPP. This will allow them to distribute the access across all of the users dialing into their service and reduce any degradation due to lack of bandwidth management available.

The purpose of Multichassis Multilink PPP is to allow resources for a connection protocol, PPP, to be consolidated into one stream of bandwidth while being managed across multiple servers. Doing this will allow an ISPs large pipe bandwidth to the Internet to be split out across multiple individual PPP connections and used by many more customers.