What is the difference between PPTP and L2TP?
The difference between L2TP and PPTP is that the former combines the control and data channels of the latter, and runs over UDP as opposed to TCP. UDP is a faster, leaner (and less reliable) protocol for sending packets that, because it does not retransmit lost packets, is commonly used in real-time Internet communications. PPTP, by contrast, separates the control and data channels into control stream that runs over TCP and a data stream that runs over GRE (a less popular Internet standard). Combining the control/data channels and using high-performance UDP makes L2TP more “firewall friendly” than PPTP — a crucial advantage for an extranet protocol — since most firewalls do not support GRE.