Ethernet connection loss on mac studio

MrHoffamn--

you are right in every case EXCEPT that the Mac Studio Spec explicitly says, "no 100 M Bits/sec Ethernet"

Ethernet

• 10Gb Ethernet (Nbase-T Ethernet with support for 1Gb, 2.5Gb, 5Gb, and 10Gb Ethernet using RJ-45 connector)

Mac Studio - Technical Specifications - Apple

Note the missing speeds lower than 1 Gbits.

10Gb Ethernet:

"energy efficient" drops power to the 10Gb Ethernet chip to save energy. It is NOT compatible with Top Speed. In the hardware pane, under Duplex, set: “Full-Duplex, Flow Control” NOT “Full-Duplex, Flow Control, power efficient” to disable power saving and boost top speed.

The Mac Studio has a 10Gb Ethernet port. This 10G Ethernet port is NOT compatible with speeds slower than ONE-Gigabit Ethernet. It is also NOT compatible with cables that have fewer than all four pairs available for data (NO power-over-Ethernet allowed.)

If you have some fancy equipment at the other end of the cable, it is possible it is trying to make a 10Gb connection. A 10Gb (or 5Gb or 2.5Gb) connection is only stable when cables are excellent and fairly short (like Category-6 rated cables under 100 feet). If either of those are not true, or you have you added patch cables that are not Category-6 rated, you could be seeing it connect at a faster-than-Gigabit speed, then error out and disconnect.

The setting [√] ABV/AEV mode   selected on the hardware pane of advanced Wi-Fi or Ethernet OR in your Router may constrain the connection in unexpected ways that could limit overall performance. The feature is used ONLY for prioritizing video streams.

Above is correct, save for a detail or two.

Per Apple, the 10GBASE-T (10 GbE) port is compatible with 100BASE-T (100 MbE), given a Cat 5e or Cat 6 cable.

Details: About the 10 Gigabit Ethernet port on Mac - Apple Support

The port should also work with 10 GBASE-T capable PoE switch, too.

And yeah, older patch cables and older wiring won’t necessarily play very well with 10 GbE. For reliable 10 GbE, Cat 5e+ (350 MHz), or Cat 6, or better is needed. (Yeah, Cat 5e+ 350 MHz isn’t part of a standard, but various vendors were selling that before 5e solidified at 100 MHz. I installed a lot of it, too.)

Mac Pro tower 2023 as well:

Two 10Gb Ethernet ports

• 10Gb Ethernet (Nbase-T Ethernet with support for 1Gb, 2.5Gb, 5Gb, and 10Gb Ethernet using RJ-45 connector)

I think they chose not to support sub 1 Gigabit baseband (two pair cables) at all.

Actual Speed:

The good way to check the actual connection speed USED to be Network Utility, But in Catalina and later, Apple has deprecated Network Utility and now you have to use a Terminal command to see your actual connection speed. First, you need to know what en number the link is. then you use a command like this one, substituting the actual en number.

my main Ethernet connection uses BSD name en2 (as shown in) :

 menu > about this Mac > (system report) > network:

Aquantia AQC107-B0:

Name: ethernet

Type: Ethernet Controller

Bus: PCI

Slot: Slot-3

Vendor ID: 0x1d6a

Device ID: 0x87b1

Subsystem Vendor ID: 0x1d6a

Subsystem ID: 0x0001

Revision ID: 0x0002

Link Width: x4

BSD name: en2

Kext name: AppleEthernetAquantiaAqtion.kext

Location: /System/Library/Extensions/IONetworkingFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AppleEthernetAquantiaAqtion.kext

Version: 1.0.64

Terminal command:

ifconfig en2 | grep media

with this as my output for 10 Gigabit Ethernet:

media: 10Gbase-T <full-duplex,flow-control>

For ‘regular’ Gigabit Ethernet, you should get this instead:

media: 1000baseT <full-duplex,flow-control>

Errors detected:

To see if an Ethernet link is throwing more than a handful of initial errors, you can use Terminal command:

netstat -I en5

This is the resulting output. Counters are In-packets, In-errors, Out-packets, Out-Errors, Collisions. There should never be more than handful of errors from starting up, and in most cases, NONE.

Name       Mtu   Network       Address            Ipkts Ierrs    Opkts Oerrs  Coll

en5   8163  <Link#4>    00:01:d2:1a:00:dd   696697     0   484301     0     0

en5   8163  grantsmacpr fe80:4::461:ea0d:   696697     -   484301     -     -

en5   8163  192.168.0/23  192.168.0.204     696697     -   484301     -     -

If the link were running beyond its ability to run and be stable, for example it auto-speeded to 10Gb but the cabling could only reliably support 2.5Gb, we would see non-zero errors counts, and errors increasing over time. (and possibly, disconnecting)

Interesting. Conflicting documents from Apple. Nit the first time that’s happened. Bug logged.