Link pulse when autonegotiation is off on FE, GE Ethernet According to Wikipedia about link pulse, link pulse is used to detect link failure/L1 status. Autonegotiation on FE and GE use link pulse mechanism. When speed and duplex are forced and autonegotiation is turned off, is the interface still generate link pulse?

I believe the answer is **no**.

Unfortunately, because of the history of Ethernet, you often see statements about it that are only true for 10Mb/s operation, or only for half-duplex operation and so forth.

802.3 clause 28.1.4.1 says:

> Auto-Negotiation does not support the transmission of the NLP sequence. The 10BASE-T PMA provides this function if it is connected to the MDI.

In other words, you don't get link test pulses sent if you force the speed to 100Mb/s or 1000Mb/s. They are unnecessary, because idle symbols are continuously transmitted in these modes.