 Cat 5E, UTP vs FTP. UTP stands for Unshielded Twisted Pair and FTP is Foil Twisted Pair. Therefore FTP is similar to standard UTP cable, with the addition of a foil shield surrounding the inner cores. Thus providing additional protection from external noise inference. Although the additional shielding provides additional external protection it doesn't affect the overall Cat 5E cable performance. Both UTP and FTP are still capable of 100 MHz and 1 Gigabit transmission.