At Arc Box Labs, we discovered that UniFi gateways struggle with high-speed PPPoE connections. While our ISP provides 5 Gbps, the UDM Pro Max typically only reaches between 1400 Mbps and 1800 Mbps. This performance hit occurs because most UniFi gateways lack the hardware acceleration required for the CPU-intensive task of PPPoE encapsulation/decapsulation.

Most high-end UniFi gateways, including the EFG, use OEM platforms that lack PPPoE hardware acceleration. In contrast, the UCG Fiber can exceed 5000 Mbps because its Media Tek SoC includes dedicated acceleration. Since firmware updates cannot fix the underlying hardware limitations, we implemented a workaround.

We utilized a technique called PPPoE Half-Bridge (or Zero IP Bridge) using Open Wrt. By offloading the PPPoE dialing to a dedicated device, the UniFi gateway receives a public IPv4 via DHCP. This allows the UniFi hardware to focus on routing and IDS/IPS without the heavy CPU load of PPPoE processing.