North American Network Operators Group
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MTU of the Internet?

  • From: Peter Ford
  • Date: Wed Feb 04 11:41:01 1998 
Several people have noted to the Microsoft Support and Product groups that
they want the Windows 95 PPP MTU to be set to 576 (down from 1500).  this
change is in Windows 98.

The reason for this change cited by many customers is that many ISPs have
576 MTUs set "inside" their networks and packets get fragmented.

How prevelant is this fragmentation and how prevelant is this MTU in ISPs?


Are there statistics that can be shared on how much traffic they see on
their networks that are IP fragments?

Why do ISPs set their MTUs to 576 instead of ~1500 or even ~4K?

thanks in advance for your responses,

peter