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As well as cabling the venue, Systimax signed up as a platinum sponsor for the show, which gave it this prominent stand to show off its 10Gbps Ethernet cabling.

Systimax linked two servers with Intel 10Gbps adapters via a Cisco Catalyst 6500 switch and showed that it could run almost 10Gbps of traffic over the 100metre link, most of which is wrapped around the blue coil shown in the centre of the photo.

To make the demo tougher, it wrapped seven cables together to simulate the worst possible conditions for interference.The cabling used is augmented Category 6, or Cat 6a, UTP (unshielded twisted pair), which is designed to provide 10Gbps transmission on links of up to 100metres with as little interference as possible.

When ZDNet.co.uk visited, transmission peaked briefly at 9322Mbps, or 9.1Gbps, with most the remainder lost to packet overheads. But although the technology has been available for over three years, few customers seem to have bought it.When asked by ZDNet.co.uk, Systimax's UK managing director John McCarthy said there were a "few" customers in the finance and media verticals, but could only name one, which was Barclays.