Question : 100/Duplex vs 10/Half-duplex

Hi guys,

What's the effect of going 100/Duplex vs 10/Half-duplex in a broadcast environment for DHCP? There are about 10 nodes booting up at an instance.
Advantages and disadvantages... theories and experience please....

Also, when is the right envrionment to use half and full duplex?

Regards,
chobo

Answer : 100/Duplex vs 10/Half-duplex

Wired Ethernet is entirely different than wireless - you cannot compare them at the layer 1 & 2 levels.  There is A LOT of extra protocol overhead (or under ...) for Wireless Ethernet.

In a full duplex, switched environment - you should NOT have ANY collisions.  This the beauty of using full duplex - each station and port can send and receive at the same time.  This is because of buffers on the switch capable of receiving traffic on all ports and using seperate circuitry to send on all ports if necessary.

The issue with mixing Autonegotiate with 100 Full is that when you use 100 Full, it disables collision detection circuitry - so the 100 Full side thinks it can send whenever it wants to and DOES NOT listen to the wire first to make sure its clear.

Ideally, IMHO, you should make your entire environment autonegotiate (except for servers) - so that your users can plug in laptops and get optimatl performance and take them home and plug into their SOHO gear and not have any layer1 or 2 issues at home.