These also matter on the remote site. An important aspect to consider on the router, however, is compression. The Van Jacobson standard for compressing IP header data eliminates a lot of the overhead traffic in an IP connection. Almost every dial-up device supports this standard. These units did, too.
Stac compression is another popular compression technique.
It compresses not just the IP header, but the entire packet. The Pipeline and the Pacesetter both supported Stac compression. It was hard getting the compression to work with the Pacesetter's beta release. Some ZIP files could not be downloaded to the Pacesetter, because it could not decrypt the compressed data. We could upload the same ZIP file to the remote site.