North American Network Operators Group
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Re: MTU of the Internet?

  • From: Dirk Harms-Merbitz
  • Date: Wed Feb 04 14:14:26 1998 
Could be related to dialup people wanting lower latencies in
multiplayer games.

Dirk

On Wed, Feb 04, 1998 at 12:05:29PM -0500, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> 
> Peter Ford writes:
> > 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.
> 
> I know of no modern networking media in common use at ISPs that has an
> MTU below 1000, and have not heard of ISPs with MTUs that low. Also,
> the ISP's PPP could simply negotiate the MTU down -- it need not
> accept a large MTU, no matter what Windows would like. The entire
> story sounds, to say the least, fishy.
> 
> BTW, if Windows 95 is doing path MTU discovery, it should all be
> irrelevant.
> 
> Perry