This is hardly an operational issue. That said, I think CNN messed up their explanation rather than giving wrong advice. Some of the original RFCs for SLIP and PPP, as well as Stevens in TCP/IP Illustrated Volume I, pointed out that lower mtu's on dialup lines could significantly improve latency for interactive traffic while having only a small efficiency loss for data intensive traffic. The key was that you didn't want small high-priority packets to be waiting in a queue while larger full-size mtu packets were being sent. Matt Vadim Antonov wrote:
Check http://cnn.com/TECH/computing/9805/26/net.access.idg/index.html
Those bozos are suggesting to reduce MTU from 1500 to 576 to "improve performance", so packets "won't fragment in backbones"! The bright idea to fix CTS/RTS setting didn't come along in their brilliant minds.
Here goes the average packet size. Down the drain...
Now what do we do to control the damage?
I also think it's a good time to measure the gullibilty of the general public by measuring packet size distribution :)
--vadim