ISPs and MTUs
I discussed the maximum transmission unit (MTU) in Chapter 6. Back in the dark ages (before Windows Vista), Microsoft users often found themselves with terrible connection problems due to the fact that IP packets were too big to fit into certain network protocols. The largest Ethernet packet is 1500 bytes, so some earlier versions of Windows set their MTU size to a value less than 1500 to minimize the fragmentation of packets. The problem cropped up when you tried to connect to a technology other than Ethernet, such as DSL. Some DSL carriers couldn’t handle an MTU size greater than 1400. When your network’s packets are so large that they must be fragmented to fit into your Internet service provider’s packets, we call it an MTU ...
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