Aspects of a method and system for utilization of a reserved and/or out of band channel for managing a data rate of an Ethernet channel are provided. In this regard, a data rate of a network link may be managed via traffic communicated over a reserved and/or out of band channel on said network link. The reserved and/or out of band channel may be an auxiliary channel established in the IEEE 802.11AN standard. Traffic communicated over the reserved and/or out of band channel may enable negotiating a data rate for the link, scheduling a change in the data rate on the link, exchanging link state information, configuring a number of active physical channels on the link, configuring a signal constellation utilized for representing data on said the link, configuring an inter-frame or inter-packet gap, and/or configuring signal levels utilized for signaling on the link.