Thoughts on increasing MTUs on the internet

Thu Apr 12 23:17:44 UTC 2007

Saku Ytti wrote:

> IXP peeps, why are you not offering high MTU VLAN option?
> From my point of view, this is biggest reason why we today
> generally don't have higher end-to-end MTU.
> I know that some IXPs do, eg. NetNOD but generally it's
> not offered even though many users would opt to use it.

At LONAP a jumbo frames peering vlan is on the 'to investigate' list. I
am not sure if there is that much interest though. Another vlan, another
SVI, another peering session...

The fabric itself is enabled to 9216 bytes; we have several members
exchanging L2TP DSL traffic at higher MTUs but this is currently done
over private (i.e. member addressed) vlans.

There are some other possible IX applications... MPLS springs to mind as
another network technology which requires at least baby giants; what
would providers use this for? Handoff of multiprovider l2/l3 VPNs?

The other technology which sees people deploying jumbos out there is
storage. Selling storage as well as transit over the IX? It could happen :-)

-- 
Will Hargrave             will at lonap.net
Technical Director
LONAP Ltd