Point-to-Point Protocol over ATM

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PPPOA or PPPoA, Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) over ATM, is a network protocol for encapsulating PPP frames in ATM AAL5. It is used mainly with cable modem, DSL and ADSL services.

It offers standard PPP features such as authentication, encryption, and compression. If it is used as the connection encapsulation method on an ATM based network it can reduce overhead slightly (around 0.58%) in comparison to PPPoE. It also avoids the issues that PPPoE suffers from, related to having a MTU lower than that of standard Ethernet transmission protocols. It also supports (as does PPPoE) the encapsulation types: VC-MUX and LLC based.

Point-to-Point Protocol over Asynchronous Transfer Mode (PPPoA) is specified in RFC 2364. Though PPPoE is used in most countries^{[citation needed]}, ADSL in Austria (for some providers), Belgium (for some providers), France, Denmark, Italy (for some providers), Greece (although PPPoE is usually supported as well), the Netherlands, New Zealand, Australia (some providers), Poland, Switzerland (for some providers), the United Kingdom and some parts of the United States of America uses PPPoA. In those areas the ADSL modem/router supplied needs to support PPPoA.