Now how many USB-C to USB-C cables are there? (USB4 Update, Sept 12, 2019)

[Dunedan]

> A USB 3.1 Gen 1 cable built and sold in 2015 would have been advertised to support 5Gbps operation in 2015. Fast forward to 2019 or 2020, that exact same physical cable (Gen 1), will actually allow you to hit 20gbps using USB4.

I was prepared for most of the details, but that caught me by surprise. So you can't trust what a cable is marked with or advertised for by its manufacturer, but have to check every cable using software.

[kayfox]

I don't see how this is any different than Cet5 cables made when 100Base-TX was the standard and now work with 1000Base-T at 10x the speed. The cable was marketed based on the available standards at the time and now theres faster standards.

[diffeomorphism]

I am not seeing why a cable performing better than marked/advertised (20 instead of 5) is a problem?

[Thomaschaaf]

Why do they keep making the cables shorter? 0.8m seems very impractical for applications like charging a phone.

[sohkamyung]

The reason for that is stated in the post:

> Gen 1 cables can be 2M long, while Gen 3 cables can be 0.8m. This is just a practical consequence of physics and signal integrity when it comes to passive cables.

[rhinoceraptor]

You wouldn't need the highest bandwidth cable just to charge (although it would work), you'd need it for external GPUs or large disk arrays.

[colejohnson66]

Attenuation?