My experience is similar but my tests weren't as systematic. What concerns me about this article is the way the author bundles up the cables that are less capa

My experience is similar but my tests weren't as systematic. What concerns me about this article is the way the author bundles up the cables that are less capable for power delivery and keeps them for data. It is my experience that many of these lower grade cables concomitantly have lower grade shielding which causes data integrity/connection problems. In fact, some of the USB cables I've tested were atrociously bad, when I later removed the plastic sheath I found some essentially had no shielding at all - only a couple of strands of wire connecting to earth points at each end of the cable. Not only do these poorly-shielded cables reduce data rates to and from USB devices but also they lead to data losses. I've lost data on external hard drives with these poor cables. I've not done a survey but would be interested to know if anyone has come across, or used, or designed a RF cable leakage tester. You can check the quality of the cable's shielding by detecting the amount of RF that leaks from the cable. I've only carried out rough checks when problems have arissen and that was to get a wideband noise source and feed it down a terminated cable then use a detector such as an AM radio with an S meter to detect the leakage noise. Rough and ready empirical testing but it did the job. The differences in leakage between the various USB cables was truly spectacular, conservatively 40 dB. It would be nice to know if a small el-cheapo box were commercially available to do this.