Causes of Errdisable This feature was first implemented in order to handle special collision situations in which the switch detected excessive or late collisions on a port. Excessive collisions occur when a frame is dropped because the switch encounters 16 collisions in a row. Late collisions occur after every device on the wire should have recognized that the wire was in use. Possible causes of these types of errors include: A cable that is out of specification (either too long, the wrong type, or defective) A bad network interface card (NIC) card (with physical problems or driver problems) A port duplex misconfiguration A port duplex misconfiguration is a common cause of the errors because of failures to negotiate the speed and duplex properly between two directly connected devices (for example, a NIC that connects to a switch). Only half-duplex connections should ever have collisions in a LAN. Because of the carrier sense multiple access (CSMA) nature of Ethernet, collisions are normal for half duplex, as long as the collisions do not exceed a small percentage of traffic.