> there are products that do 2.5 Gbps, and other products that do 10 Gbps
And 5, 25, 40, 50, 100, 200, 400 Gbps.
> seems like you'd have to pick one or the other and hope the rest of the world standardizes on the same speed as you
Huh? A connection between A & B will just be as fast as the slowest link between them, be it 400 Gbps or 6 Mbps, regardless of the various other speeds. And a 10GBASE-T NIC will happily autonegotiate with a 10BASE-T NIC and everything in-between.
Maybe, not sure. I can’t immediately find anything that would specify as such, but I suppose adapters could opt to not support some modes (and I guess technically I may have been overreaching a bit on that bit anyway since autonegotiation is only mandatory at all in 1000BASE-T and later).
And 5, 25, 40, 50, 100, 200, 400 Gbps.
> seems like you'd have to pick one or the other and hope the rest of the world standardizes on the same speed as you
Huh? A connection between A & B will just be as fast as the slowest link between them, be it 400 Gbps or 6 Mbps, regardless of the various other speeds. And a 10GBASE-T NIC will happily autonegotiate with a 10BASE-T NIC and everything in-between.