[AusNOG] A question for carriers on autoneg

[Tim Warnock]

> I'm curious as to the thinking around auto negotiation being on or off for
> service handoff from list participants and their reasoning around the choice.
> 
> Humble regards,
> 
> Chris

Way back in the day(tm) some very popular Cisco devices were incapable of auto-negotiation.

Other reasons I've seen were that a lot of older carrier switches were incapable of policing ingress and egress and so the easiest way was to change the port speed.

As a side note It's worth noting you can disable auto negotiation on a 1000Base-LX (or similar gig fibre based service) - it might not be part of the IEEE but if you've dealt with NBNCo as an example you'll know it's a requirement of theirs in order to get a link up.