When signals travel through copper they create a magnetic field that in turn and induce signals on other copper wires. The solution for this is to have the cables twist around so that both of the wires recieved the same amount of noise, this is a balanced cable. I a cat 5 cable the there is 4 pairs of wires, and they all have a different number of twists per meter, allowing fewer places where the twists will line up perfectly parallel to eachother. In cat 6 the ratios are better, and also there is a plastic seperator to stop the wires from sitting so close together. You could technically try to put higher speeds through cat 5, but cross talk would just cause the data to corrupt.
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