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

  • From: Sean M. Doran
  • Date: Sat Feb 07 23:39:40 1998 
Eric Osborne <[email protected]> writes:

> We all know that there's good reasons for all sorts of
> different MTUs, mainly because of the different types of
> traffic you could have - there's always going to be a
> tradeoff between efficient transfer of large blocks of
> data and immediaecy (sp?) of response time.

I know no such thing.  My understanding of MTU is that the
Maximum Transmission Unit indicates the largest IP
datagram a logical transport medium is able to carry
without fragmentation.

There are, however, reasons why one might choose to send a
datagram (which may contain a TCP segment or some other
traffic) at smaller sizes than the transport medium or
media may support.

	Sean.