What's in an acronym?

NETWORK WORLD NEWSLETTER: STEVE TAYLOR AND JIM METZLER ON WIDE
AREA NETWORKING
06/14/05
Today's focus: What's in an acronym?

Dear networking.world@gmail.com,

In this issue:

* MTUs, MTUs, and TLAs
* Links related to Wide Area Networking
* Featured reader resource
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Today's focus: What's in an acronym?

By Steve Taylor and Jim Metzler

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.

RELATED EDITORIAL LINKS

More problems with PPPoE
Corrected version of last week's newsletter
http://www.networkworld.com/nlwan2585

Definition of Maximum Transmission Unit
http://www.networkworld.com/nlwan2586

Definition of Multi Tenant Unit
http://www.iec.org/online/tutorials/mtu_market/

Supercomm touts convergence
Network World, 06/13/05
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2005/061305-supercomm.html?rl

Dearth of standard stalls Ethernet services
Network World, 06/13/05
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2005/061305-vpls-nni.html?rl
_______________________________________________________________
To contact: Steve Taylor and Jim Metzler

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates
and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. For more detailed
information on most of the topics discussed in this newsletter,
connect to Webtorials <http://www.webtorials.com/>, the premier
site for Web-based educational presentations, white papers, and
market research. Taylor can be reached at
<mailto:taylor@webtorials.com>

Jim Metzler is the Vice President of Ashton, Metzler &
Associates, a consulting organization that focuses on leveraging
technology for business success. Jim assists vendors to refine
product strategies, service providers to deploy technologies and
services, and enterprises evolve their network infrastructure.
He can be reached at <mailto:jim@ashtonmetzler.com>
_______________________________________________________________
This newsletter is sponsored by Concord Communications
Network World Executive Guide: The Evolution of Management
Technologies

Network and systems technologies have an important new role -
helping networked systems live up to new business realities.
With growing and shifting demands, network executives are
balancing business goals with prioritizing IT projects. Read
about the 'Future of Management', 'IT Service Management',
'Managing Security', and 'Best Practices'.
http://www.fattail.com/redir/redirect.asp?CID=106684
_______________________________________________________________
ARCHIVE LINKS

Archive of the WAN newsletter:
http://www.networkworld.com/newsletters/frame/index.html
_______________________________________________________________
FEATURED READER RESOURCE
VoIP SECURITY

For the latest in VoIP security, check out NW's Research Center
on this very topic. Here you will find a collection of the
latest news, reviews, product testing results and more all
related to keeping VoIP networks secure. Click here for more:
<http://www.networkworld.com/topics/voip-security.html>
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