On Wed, 14 Jun 2000, Brandon Ross wrote:
While there are certainly shortcomings to using GbE as a public exchange infrastructure, I fail to see how a 1500 byte MTU has anything to do with it. In every network I have ever seen, there have very, very rarely been any packets larger than 1500 bytes.
One of the major arguments against gigE I've heard is the lower MTU. Yes, currently there are not much packets that are larger than 1500 due to endsystems, but if we limit the infrastructure then there'll never be a larger MTU here. ATM/FDDI/POS and even Token Ring (to mix apples with oranges) all support larger MTUs and future standards will probably will as well. Therefore I believe that any shared medium used for exchanging traffic should also have the same capabilities. Larger packets mean fewer forwarding/routing decisions per second for the same megabit rate of traffic. Think ahead 3-5 years, do we really want to stick with the 1500 MTU just because this limitation is built in into the backbone infrastructure? I have received a few emails stating that several hardware vendors support jumbo frames on gigE. The question whether cisco does as well immediately pops up. So far nobody has mentioned their name as one that does support jumbo frames. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se