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Amazon.com Now Bans USB Type-C Cables That Aren't Up To Spec (google.com)
Google engineer, Benson Leung has been on a mission to get rid of USB Type-C cables that aren't compliant with Type-C 1.1 spec. He reminds us that these cables could potentially lead to damage. Over the past few months, he has reviewed over a dozen of USB Type-C cables on Amazon.com and concluded that the vast majority of them aren't compliant with the aforementioned standard. Now he reports: Amazon.com has just made a change to their "Prohibited listings" for Electronics. They've added the following line: Any USB-C (or USB Type-C) cable or adapter product that is not compliant with standard specifications issued by "USB Implementers Forum Inc." What does this mean? It means that cable manufacturers who sell poorly made or intentionally deceptive USB Type-C cables and adapters are banned from Amazon, officially. Really great news, but we all have to continue to be vigilant and call out any bad products we find on Amazon and other stores (both online and brick and mortar) as we find them.
Great news would be Amazon white-listing compliant cables, I have a hard time imaging El Cheapo Cables Inc. being overly concerned about a bullet point in the amazon ToS.
Slashdot bans postings that aren't up to spec. Like this one.
Put it in the devices where it belongs.
So back in the day when I did motherboard design, the biggest headache we had during our automated testing was USB keys and USB hard disks that had bad FW such that they would randomly disconnect, or otherwise hang up host-side code. MS Windows is least tolerant of this, and would often blue-screen. It seems every generation during our testing we'd get either blue-screens or BIOS lockups with some of these devices, have to go on a 2-3 week crusade of signal integrity analysis and measurements to prove that electrically nothing was wrong. Then inevitably we'd hook up a protocol analyzer and see things that just plain didn't make sense: the disconnects happened for NO reason. They happened with some vendors and not others, or certain devices from one vendor but not others.
Lots of money spent, lots of time wasted, but it turns out that that cheap overseas shit we all love so much doesn't always work so great. The bottom line is if you are going to have a standard you have to have some way of keeping people from sticking your logo on it if they cannot meet the requirements. It's great this Google engineer took up the mantle of shaming bad products, but the problem is more widespread than mere cables.
Now Amazon needs to deal with their entire counterfeit sex toy problem. If you're not aware, never buy sex toys off Amazon. Most of their products are low quality, counterfeits of more respectable brands. Often they're unsafe or made to low standards. Most manufactures will stop selling to any store that uses Amazon.
USB is still a serial protocol with the change between USB 2 and 3 was 1) splitting a common pair used for sending and receiving (simplex) to two pairs to allow for duplex transfer 2) specifying the higher speed pairs to have tighter ratings to enable higher bit rates.
The idea that Ethernet (assuming you mean common Cat 5/6 cables) works better than USB cables is ludicrous! They aren't specified to tolerate the plug/unplug cycles of even a cheap USB cable and the plug itself is fragile.
so that's why they call their tablet fire...
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The max current at any power level is 5A. The 100W spec is 5A at 20V.