Typical transceivers have multiple near-end and multiple far-end crosstalk cancellation filters. Crosstalk cancellation is one of the largest contributors to power dissipation in the DSP portion of high speed Ethernet transceivers. By detecting the cable type, a transceiver could automatically turn off its crosstalk cancellation filters when driving shielded twisted pair (STP) cables and substantially reduce the overall power dissipation in this configuration. Adaptive digital crosstalk cancellers automatically adjust the coefficients of a digital filter to match the coupling function between two channels. The impulse response of an optimal crosstalk cancellation filter can be used to determine a metric indicating the amount of coupling between the two channels. STP cables will have a much lower amount of coupling between wire-pairs than unshielded twisted pair cables.