The primary KAREN VLAN was changed to support a 9000 byte IP MTU on Tuesday, 26 June.  This change allows members to take advantage of the low latency, high bandwidth characteristics of KAREN to achieve greater data throughput than conventional networks permit.  This is achieved without impacting the support for existing traffic.

KAREN members have already been taking advantage of the possibilities that this change allows. Ben Yeldon of AUT and Craig Miskell of AgResearch have performed some initial testing.

"Testing has shown a 3-fold increase in overall throughput when using large (4000byte+) frames vs 1500byte frames", says Craig.

This performance gain was seen without performing any tuning of the systems involved.