Comment 1 for bug 393586

As operator of a university network let me say that most people misunderstand ethernet autonegotiation. When they set speed and duplex they don't realise that setting implicitly disables the NWay autonegotiation protocol at speeds under 1Gbps. Thus they do not think to set exactly the same parameters on the partner interface. This misunderstanding is a major cause of "late collision" errors. Those errors radically reduce TCP goodput.

It would be nice for nm-connection-editor to offer speed=10Mbps, duplex=half as a single option for when autonegotiation fails so that people can get basic connectivity. This is the speed and duplex assumed when the NWay autonegotiation protocol is not seen, and thus is always safe to use when the partner interface remains running autonegotiation. Other options could he hidden in another panel, which reminds people to also manually alter the configuration of the partner interface.

In this way Ubuntu and GNOME could offer a workable solution for a repeatedly-failing autonegotiation whilst not increasing the amount of network host misconfiguration.