What is a mtu value on wireless Internet?

Does MTU settings affects the speed of internet?

• I checked out my regedit and my MTU settings are default but not shown how much, but when I ping some website, it pings with 32bytes of data only, where as the max value is 1500. Though I'm not on the any LAN, I'm using xp Pro, ver stand alone PC. Does this really affects the Internet speed or not Pls guide....

• Answer:

  I think you would be doing "ping www.google.com" and seeing 32 bytes of data being sent, that doesn't prove then u'r PC MTU is 32 bytes, it just the default value used by ping application. If you do "ping -l 1400 www.google.com" you would probably see ping succeding. Most likely being windows XP u'r MTU would be 1500 bytes. Try "ping -l 1550 -f www.google.com" if u'r pc say's fragmentation is needed then it confirm's u'r MTU value. Last value with -f option which succeeds is u'r MTU. And don't worry as long as MTU is above 1200 bytes you performance will be okay for normal oprerations unless you have some highbandwidth fiber link or something then you can improve by setting u'r MTU to 9600 etc. If it's not too small i.e. above 1200 you won't get any improvement by tweaking MTU value for day to day uses.