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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: MTUs - Was: Strange public traceroutes return private RFC1918 addresses
Warren Kumari wrote: > > 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. Because that was a conveniently large amount of very pricey memory availble at the time? Because that was the amount that could be blatted down a 500 meter hose and get the "CD" part to work at some common clock rate?
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