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MTUs - Was: Strange public traceroutes return private RFC1918 addresses

  • From: Warren Kumari
  • Date: Thu Feb 05 15:10:17 2004


Ok, I know that this is getting away from the original thread, but I've always wondered this...

Why is the MTU on Ethernet 1500 bytes? I have looked through various docs (eg IEEE Std 802.x) and can find where maxUntaggedFrameSize is listed as 1518 octets, but there is no mention of why this was chosen. I know where the minimum frame size comes from (CSMA/CD and propagation times, etc), but the maximum frame size number sounds fairly arbitrary.


-- Warren.
On Feb 4, 2004, at 5:46 PM, Hani Mustafa wrote:

How does a 50Mbyte MTU sound like?

http://www.psc.edu/~mathis/MTU/

~Hani Mustafa


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