NETGEAR N150 Wireless Router WNR1000 - Manual (Page 81)

N150 Wireless Router WNR1000 User Manual
Fine-Tuning Your Network 5-15
v1.0, January 2009
• Microwave ovens (no closer than 10 feet)
• Choose your settings.
– Use a scanning utility to determine what other wireless networks are operating nearby, and
choose an unused channel.
– Turn off SSID broadcast, and change the default SSID. Other nearby devices might
automatically try to connect to your network several times a second, which can cause
significant performance reduction.
• Use WMM to improve the performance of voice and video traffic over the wireless link.
Changing the MTU Size
The Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU) is the largest data packet a network device transmits.
When one network device communicates across the Internet with another, the data packets travel
through many devices along the way. If any device in the data path has a lower MTU setting than
the other devices, the data packets must be split or “fragmented” to accommodate the one with the
smallest MTU.
The best MTU setting for NETGEAR equipment is often just the default value, and changing the
value might fix one problem but cause another. Leave MTU unchanged unless one of these
situations occurs:
• You have problems connecting to your ISP, or other Internet service, and either the technical
support of the ISP or of NETGEAR recommends changing the MTU size. These might require
an MTU change:
– A secure Web site that will not open, or displays only part of a Web page
– Yahoo e-mail
– MSN
– America Online’s DSL service
• You use VPN and have severe performance problems.
• You used a program to optimize MTU for performance reasons, and now you have
connectivity or performance problems.
Note: An incorrect MTU setting can cause Internet communication problems such as the
inability to access certain Web sites, frames within Web sites, secure login pages,
or FTP or POP servers.