Network engineers still have heated discussions about whether to enable autonegotiation in the network. As mentioned earlier, autonegotiation is a big advantage for mobile users. A user should not have to worry about configuring his laptop every time he goes to a different location.

The rule of thumb is to enable autonegotiation on access ports that connect to users. Mission-critical devices should be statically configured to protect the network from possible outages and performance hits. Therefore, connections between routers and switches, or servers and switches should be hard coded with the appropriate speed and duplex settings.