@rixthetrix Wow, a "technician" that doesn't know about detection level, encoding, checksumming and buffering... You are mixing things and ethernet category of cables have nothing to do with USB cables...
Obviously, you don't know about high-speed differential pairs, linear feedback shift register, 8b/10b encoding, etc etc etc.
And about transmission of digital signal being "analog", that's just plain talking for nothing... Of course, every electrical signal could be described as" analog" but that's not the point... We're talking digital communication and encoding, bit detection, etc... In a computer, this is the same principle, be it in gigahertz range...
"There’s nothing in the cables passing little ones and zeros across the cable." Oh and what is digital transport then? And ethernet? And transmission lines in a computer? Incredible...
And the top of the top:" excuse my rant, I am just trying to ensure people don't get misinformed and miss out on relatively cheap solutions that will significantly increase performance." Wow...
That's exactly what you do... I can tell you didn't pass any degree, you should study a bit before trying to look that you know something, you just don't...
Go get a good engineering book and read before throwing crap like you did... if you're up to understand something... Here is a free MIT book, try to read and understand it...
http://www.mit.edu/~6.450/handouts/6.450book.pdf