USB‑C cables x-rayed

No, I’m only talking about USB C-to-C cables. There are plenty of high amperage (3A or 5A) PD-charging USB 2.0 C-to-C cables to be found - most 2m or 3m (6/10ft) USB-C cables marketed for charging are likely to be USB 2.0 only. This is in large part due to signal integrity and cable thickness - 3m is the longest certifiable cable length for passive USB 3.0/.1/.2G2 cables, which means that it takes pretty thick cabling to maintain the signal at that cable length, and this gets both (relatively) expensive and thick, making it poorly suited for a charging cable.

The max cable length for USB 2.0 cables is 5m, making it relatively easy to produce a 3m cable at that spec, and you get away with a thinner overall cable while keeping sufficiently thick power wiring for high amp charging without the cable becoming so thick it becomes cumbersome.

I own a few 3m USB 2.0 C-to-C charging cables, and they’re definitely not thin (some are obviously better than others), and neither are the much shorter 5/10Gbps USB 3.x cables I own. I shudder to think how thick a passive 3m 10Gbps 100W cable would be - likely thick enough that it would break itself quite easily. And of course 20Gbps USB 3.2g2x2 tops out at… is it 1m cable length, or 1.5? Something like that. And those cables are pretty thick even then.

The power delivery division between 2.0 and and 3.x you’re mentioning only applies to USB-A hosts and entirely predates USB-C. USB-C supersedes that spec by allowing many different combinations of charging capability and data transfer speeds as the USB-PD standard is pretty much decoupled from data transfer standards at this point. So you can get a 100W 2.0 cable (or even 240W with PD 3.1) or a 15W 3.2G2 cable or pretty much any combination you want - though low charging speed and high bandwidth are a rare combination given how relatively cheap it is to add 5A charging capabilities to such a cable.

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