How to restart PPoE internet connection ??

[Vincent Trouilliez]

I have a cable internet access. It's pretty unreliable, every other
week, it drops the connection for either a few minutes, or a few hours.

The only way to know that the connection is back, is to try connecting. 
But my connection starts automatically at boot, and there is no way I am
going to reboot every 5 minutes just to check if the connection is back
or not.

So how should I proceed to restart my PPPoE connection "by hand" ?

On the command line, I tried "pon", but then a "ifconfig" showed that
ppp0 was still not (re)created.

What is the recommended, proper/clean way of trying to re-connect ?

Regards,

Vince, hoping to change ISP soon and come back to ADSL ! ;o)