So, theory, starting from the bottom up. In this part, I’ll cover wired Ethernet over UTP standards. The official standards to date are:

802.3i – 10BASE-T
The first widespread standard. Defaults to half-duplex and uses one copper pair for transmitting, and one for receiving. This leaves two of the four copper pairs in a Cat 5 UTP cable unused.
Requires a Cat 3 cable or higher.

802.3u – 100BASE-TX
Second widespread standard, same default half-duplex, same two copper pairs.
Requires a Cat 5 cable or higher, despite only two used pairs. Ironically, this standard introduced duplex autonegotiation, to which 10 Mbps support was added later on.

802.3ab – 1000BASE-T
Third standard, 1 Gbps. Uses all four copper pairs in a wire. Assumes full duplex. Depending on the implementation, it may try to fall back to half duplex if it can detect one of the cable pairs is damaged. Some implementations instead fall back to 100 Mbps, which does not need all pairs, or just don’t bring up the link at all.
Requires a Cat 5 cable or higher, with Cat 5e recommended (Cat 5e is the same as Cat 5, but the technical requirements are enforced more strictly).

802.3an – 10GBASE-T
This standard only uses full duplex. Half duplex is not an option and thus CSMA/CD (Collision Detection) is no longer present. Unlike previous standards, where the required cable could go up to 100 meters, 10GBASE-T has two types of cable: Cat 6, with a maximum of 55 meters in a low-interference environment and 37 meters recommended in a high-interference environment, and Cat 6a, which goes up to the usual 100 meters.

These are the speed standards over UTP.  But how do interfaces negotiate link speed and duplex?

Duplex and speed are determined using fast link pulses (FLP). Despite the name ‘autonegotiation’, it’s not really a negotiation process. Each interface on a link sends out a series of FLPs: 17 pulses, 125 microseconds apart. Between these pulses (at 62.5 microseconds from each FLP) an additional pulse may be present: if present, it’s a ‘1’, if not, it’s a ‘0’. This way, 16 boolean values are sent over the cable. These contain the supported interface modes (10 Mbps, 100 Mbps, half/full duplex). The last bit, when set to ‘1’, means another page will follow, again a series of FLPs. While 100 Mbps interfaces ignore this, 1 Gbps capable interfaces will check the following pages too because these list gigabit and 10-gigabit support. Both sides of the link will then compare capabilities and the highest common capability is chosen.

If one of both sides is set to static configuration and doesn’t send out FLPs, the interface will try to sense a carrier signal and adapt (10 and 100 Mbps have different carrier signals). Duplex mode can’t be sensed and will default to half duplex. For gigabit it’s slightly different: the standard requires autonegotiation. I haven’t found any confirmation in any documentation, but it seems setting the speed and duplex only changes the FLP values.

I originally read some papers about fast link pulses but I can’t find the source URLs anymore. Wikipedia, as often, did provide many details consistent with what I’ve read.

Up next in part II: some more details about fiber!

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