* MTUs, MTUs, and TLAs
Over 20 years ago, Steve learned Enslow’s Law of Data Communications at a seminar by Phil Enslow, Professor Emeritus at Georgia Tech College of Computing. As adapted by Steve, Enslow’s Law is that “Data Communications is 90% terminology and 10% technology.” Over the years, this has proved to be at least as true and as useful as Moore’s Law.
Over 20 years ago, Steve learned Enslow’s Law of Data Communications at a seminar by Phil Enslow, Professor Emeritus at Georgia Tech College of Computing. As adapted by Steve, Enslow’s Law is that “Data Communications is 90% terminology and 10% technology.” Over the years, this has proved to be at least as true and as useful as Moore’s Law.
And this came back to haunt us in the last newsletter. While discussing the implications of Steve’s moving to Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet (PPPoE), we made the statement, “A quick adjustment was made to the MTU size on Windows XP to go from the default of most NICs of about 1,480-bytes down to 1,300-bytes.”
Since journalistic style requires that we define all acronyms, Steve was asked to confirm in an e-mail from the editing staff, “Just wanted to check that MTU is Multi-tenant Unit.” And that’s where the proverbial best laid plans (and intentions) went awry.
As with most analysts, we were juggling several projects at the time, including a paper on Metro Ethernet and how some cool new technology could be used to deploy services in shared office space. Thus, this definition of MTU, without full context, seemed quite reasonable. But, in the context of the last newsletter, it was dead wrong.
Obviously, as many of you have pointed out in responses, MTU in this case is the “Maximum Transmission Unit.” This limits the size of packets that are sent across a link, and as explained in the original newsletter, turned out to be the root cause of the problem that Steve was experiencing when converting to PPPoE.
So to those of you who wrote to point out our most grievous transgression, Steve humbly acknowledges that we just put that in to see whether you were really reading the newsletters. 😉
Well soon be publishing our list of what we see as the most often confused TLAs (three letter acronyms), FLAs (four letter acronyms), and XFLAs (extended four letter acronyms, consisting of more than four letters, such as PPPoE). If you have particularly relevant examples of similar confusion, send them to us and we’ll try to pass along those stories as well.
