After seeing that my wireless speeds were much faster than the speeds I was getting over Ethernet, I decided to invest in some new cables. I didn’t know it before, but I saw while I was changing them out that my current cables were Cat 5e. While putting my network together, I had just been grabbing whatever cables I could find in my scrap drawers. Now I have Cat 8 cables and my speeds jumped from 7MB/s to an average of over 40MB/s. It’s a much bigger improvement than I expected, especially for such a small investment.
I’ve done my fair share of long runs of Cat6e 23 AWG with PoE and they all work fine and gigabit on distances like 100 meters or close. Sometimes even slightly above that.
Staggered will reduce the failure rate by a lot, specially if you’re into gigabit speeds or anything above it. Although I know from experience that you can get gigabit on non-staggered connectors it won’t always happen on the first try. On long distances the noise caused by having the wires side by side may also cause problems.
Btw, if you’ve small patch cables don’t use solid core for those, those should be stranded cables and they’ll be more flexible, less likely to break when bent and less prone to bad contacts.