[buserror]

Modern transceivers can do 10G on absolutely garbage twisted pair. My house was wired with absolutely dire cat5 cabling. Zero shielding and barely any copper in the pairs. I thought I'd barely be able to do 1G on them, but modern transceivers (amazon) easily do 10G over like 30M of that sort of cables.

In fact I had more trouble getting quality fiber working for that sort of distance than El Cheapo cat5. They do heat up a bit, but they work wonder.

[OneOffAsk]

Zero shielding may actually help. Shielding acts as an antenna when not properly grounded and continuous, which is more common than not.

[amluto]

Having recently terminated a nice name brand Cat6A jack (ICC brand), I’m quite unimpressed by the state of category cable shielding:

The termination comes with basically no instructions.

The connector shell contacts the shield by squishing it between the shell and the cable jacket. With a zip tie, helpfully supplied with the connector. Good luck applying much (any) compression force. Never mind that CAT6A cable jackets come in various sizes, are not manufactured to tight tolerances (why would they be?), and are quite squishy.

Compare to a high quality F connector, which is highly engineered, less expensive than a decent Cat6A jack, and makes excellent contact to the cable shield without much fiddling.

The switch that connects to it has no grounding terminal of any sort. It uses an external isolated power supply. Admittedly, the ground connection on a switch is probably doing very little at frequencies of hundreds of MHzz