The standard should be written, and let the devices decide what speed they want to speak. If sender and receiver of a packet both want to speak 1Gbit over the link with clever QAM and adaptive channel coding, then let them do that... And if another device only supports 10kbits with a single mosfet and pull up resistor, then thats fine too...
The purpose of the standard should be to define who gets to speak when on the link, and how those speeds should be negotiated, and how devices can fairly share the capacity and be functionally compatible.
The cynic in me says that if standards were written this way, with no upper bound on data rate, symbol rate, bandwidth, frequency use, etc, then standards writers would soon be out of a job.
Just like the RS-232 serial standard originally was 300 bps, but now people use functionally the same protocol to talk 9600 bps, 57600 bps, 1000000 bps, 25,000,000 bps, etc... The original RS-232 standards group is long dead, yet the standard keeps going on because people can use the same spec (with a few tweaks along the way) faster and faster for 6 decades!
The standard should be written, and let the devices decide what speed they want to speak. If sender and receiver of a packet both want to speak 1Gbit over the link with clever QAM and adaptive channel coding, then let them do that... And if another device only supports 10kbits with a single mosfet and pull up resistor, then thats fine too...
The purpose of the standard should be to define who gets to speak when on the link, and how those speeds should be negotiated, and how devices can fairly share the capacity and be functionally compatible.