> I have been allowing my PPP connection to my ISP to "negotiate"
> the link.  Taking a look at things with 'pppstats' I get the following.
> Shouldn't a majority of these packets be getting compressed?

pppstats on my system reports the vast majority of packets being compressed,
so I assume pppstats works.  Perhaps your ISP's ppp box does not support
compression?  Turn on the debug flag to pppd (and provide a syslog entry
for local2 (I think)), and watch the protocol negotiation.