[vurel]

I've read about this before... what it is doing is setting the packet size to be the biggest size the network will allow.... a packet smaller than the max size will waste the difference between the packet size and the max packet size... a packet that is too big will be split and the difference between the remainder and the max packet size will be wasted (I wonder if making the packet size a multiple of the max size would result in the same benifits as setting the packet size to the max size.... would proboably increase latency due to the extra processing to split and reassemble packets)

A way to picture it would be putting potatoes through a pipe... the goal being to put the most potato mass through the pipe in a limited amount of time.... you can only throw one potato every second, if the potatoes you are getting are too small then the space around the potato is not being filled and is wasted, if the potatoes you are recieving are too big, you must first cut them into chunks that will fit in the pipe, most of the chunks would be the size of the pipe, but the last chunk of each potato (almost always the second chunk because potatoes are usually within a reasonable size range,and thus every other chunk thrown down the pipe) would be wasting the unused space. but if every potato was exactly the size of the pipe then you would achieve the most efficient possible transfer of potato mass.

I apologise for the extreamly odd analogy... but i think it does help explain what is going on... there is no reason why the cable company should object to this sort of tweaking, you are using the same bandwith... just more efficiently... your potatoes are still going through the pipe at a rate of one potato per second and the pipe is still the same size.