RE: MTU of the Internet?

This thread has drifted all over the place and the only conclusions I can see are: The core infrastructure MTU is >= 1500 People are telling clients to set their Win95 MTU to 576 PMTU is randomly broken by clueless filtering Some dial-access devices are buffer limited A small MTU (53 byte?) would increase perceived response at the expense of performance I have been an advocate of the bigger defaults is better camp, but there is a real concern that the wrong values could actually cause more damage than their gain is worth. If the above list is incorrect or incomplete it would be useful for people to constructively tell Peter that now.