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These can not be very good cables because they lack the direction arrow that the Belden audiophile Ethernet cables have (had?). This was so you would know which way to plug them in. Packets flow from hub/switch to the device.

And if you believe this, I have a bridge to sell you. It is orange and you will make your money back in picture postcard royalties.

It's in the caption of the very first picture:

Audiophile-grade "Vodka" Ethernet cables, from AudioQuest. They even have directional indicators!

But, surprisingly for Ars, they missed the point of those directional indicators. The article on electrical testing hints at it:

Finally, the braided shield inside the cable drew some comments. "There is no continuity from the body of the one connector to the body of the other, indicating that the shield has not been terminated to one or both of the connector," noted Denke. "Our 6A uses an absorptive shield—that is, the cable is shielded but the shield is not terminated at either end. Alien crosstalk is the crosstalk which occurs between cables, as opposed to the internal crosstalk which occurs between the pairs in a cable. This may also be why there are unterminated shields on the Audioquest cable—I’m not really sure what the reason is there, though I had thought that the shields on Cat 7 were required to be tied to ground. It is also possible—I have no handy way to test—that they've tied the shield to one end only, though this would be highly nonstandard for network cabling." (emphasis added)

It's highly nonstandard for network cabling, but highly standard for audio cabling - it's called a telescoping shield and is used to prevent ground loops and audible (60 Hz) hum. Typically, you leave the shield connected at the low-impedance source, and disconnect it at the high-impedance load... as a result, the cable actually does have a directionality, but on the shield, rather than the signal lines. I can guarantee that's the intent with these cables and why they're marked with directional arrows, and it's pretty surprising that Ars and Denke missed it. Maybe they were stuck thinking "network" cable rather than "audio" cable.

That said, because these are network cables, that telescoping shield is irrelevant. You're not going to get ground hum into your amplifier from your network card, the way you would with a shield on an analog audio cable. They're simply not connected, and if they were, you'd have much bigger issues - like that hum causing all sorts of problems on your PCI bus. This is why network cable shields are typically connected at both ends: ground loops are irrelevant.

FYI,
http://www.belden.com/resource...

Nope. Depending on the fiber, there are all manner of dispersion effects at the minimum that distort the signal and lose information. Hence Modal Bandwidth for modal dispersion in multimode fibers, measured in MHz / km, that explains what kind of bandwidth (in the analog, original sense) per distance the fiber is capable of transporting. Belden has a good brief on it: http://www.belden.com/pdfs/TechInfo/TechBandwidth.htm.
In practical terms, these distortion effects severely limit multimode fibers -- the real capability of the fiber is much higher than the cheap optics can realize, but it demonstrates that there distortion limits. Adding different colors (DWDM) and smarter waveforms and all such stuff can help, but at the end of the day you're limited; the bigger your fiber is, the longer it is, the less information you can push through it.
Singlemode fiber doesn't suffer from modal dispersion, but it has its own issues (different frequencies travel at different speed and interact with each other, basically.)

The loss of energy in a co-ax cable is well known. It is usually measured in dB per 100 feet. Bad cable at 2 GHz might be 100 dB per 100 feet. I leave it to you as an exercise to figure out the loss of two inches of cable.

Belden RG-174 has about .6dB loss/ft @ 5.6GHz
http://www.belden.com/pdfs/TechInfo/Coax%20Electrical%20Characteristics.pdf
http://www.belden.com/pdfs/03Belden_Master_Catalog/06Coaxial_Cables/06.59_66.pdf

The loss of energy in a co-ax cable is well known. It is usually measured in dB per 100 feet. Bad cable at 2 GHz might be 100 dB per 100 feet. I leave it to you as an exercise to figure out the loss of two inches of cable.

Belden RG-174 has about .6dB loss/ft @ 5.6GHz
http://www.belden.com/pdfs/TechInfo/Coax%20Electrical%20Characteristics.pdf
http://www.belden.com/pdfs/03Belden_Master_Catalog/06Coaxial_Cables/06.59_66.pdf

Belden http://www.belden.com/ is selling wire.

No.

Well, okay. If you want to go into business of undercutting snake-oil cable guys, try their catalog:
http://belden.com/03Products/03_CableBasics.cfm

They can supply you with standard speaker cable with extra-thick insulator and nice texture. Gold "plated" connectors can be bought for approximately same cost as connectors without gold "plating" unless you're into real mass production.

Then again, if you're not gouging ridiculous sums for cable, it's not REALLY audiophool grade and you can forget those all-important reviews in magazines..

I'm a Cat5 kind of guy. I use Cat5 for almost everything except running current fresh from the walloutlet. If you are cabling your house I suggest you use Cat5 or 6, forinstance this high performance TP Multimedia cable.
I suggest cabling from every room to one central point, where you connect them to a patchpanel. By using a specially made split or cable in each end you can run virtually anything over it. oBTW, use a shielded cable with shielded patchpanel and shielded RJ-45. And remember that it's not shielded unless grounded in one end!

What I have used Cat5 for so far:

Audio
Video
VGA
Controlsignals for a PLC (Programmable Logical Controller)
Doorbell
Analog phones
ISDN
Antenna
RF (Didn't work too well...)
Mouse&Keyboard

All of these I've run via standard wallsockets to a patchpanel, and sometimes out to another patchpanel. By making your own split you can run a combo of signals via one 4 pair cable, forinstance EtherNet, Analog phone & ISDN.

Some unconventional uses for Cat5 (Done'em all):

Cat of 5 tails... =)
Faradaycage
Holding a carengine in place(!)
Used generic as a rope
Running 230V, 10A (Not exactly recommended...)
Belt
IR from a room to another (needs extra HW)

Geir L K

A useful product is Belden 7878A Home Automation cable. Expensive, but just one pull gets you two Cat 5e cables, two RG-6/U coax cables and two multimode strands of fiber. Plus, it's green and 1.6cm thick. Specs should be here.