While I like our hotel, the Wi-Fi service has been really wonky. Stuff coming down seemed to be fine, but anytime I tried to send data up it would timeout or not go at all.

I had some nagging memory of this happening before, and when I woke up this morning the solution dawned on me. Once while working in England the same thing happened, and it had to do with PPPoE limiting the MTU size to 1492, while the default is 1500 for most ethernet interfaces.

Simply running:

sudo ifconfig en1 mtu 1400

on my Mac fixed my issues completely, so I thought I’d share. This is probably not limited to Europe but that’s where I have seen it before.