A switch of a computer network with a plurality of dual speed Ethernet client ports and at least one high speed Ethernet uplink port. The combined data rate of the Ethernet dual speed client ports has a maximum value which is higher than the data rate of the Ethernet uplink port. The Bandwidth Control limits the number of enabled Ethernet client ports so that the combined data rate of the enabled client ports substantially equals, or slights exceeds the data rate of the uplink port. In this way the speed and amount of switch memory can be minimized in the switch itself and the memory burden is divided among the clients. The dividing of the memory burden greatly reduces the worst case scenario and allows each client to individually chose the speed and amount of memory based on its own cost/benefit situation.