Frame Relay does not natively support features such as authentication, link quality monitoring, and reliable transmission. Based on this it is sometimes advantageous to encapsulate an additional PPP header between the normal layer 2 Frame Relay encapsulation and the layer 3 protocol. By running PPP over Frame Relay (PPPoFR) we can then implement authentication of Frame Relay PVCs, or even bind multiple PVCs together using PPP Multilink.

PPPoFR is configure in Cisco IOS through the usage of a Virtual-Template interface. A Virtual-Template is a PPP encapsulated interface that is designed to spawn a “template” of configuration down to multiple member interfaces. The traditional usage of this interface has been on dial-in access servers, such as the AS5200, to support multiple PPP dialin clients terminating their connection on a single interface running IP.

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