This paper focuses on assessment and design of transmission systems for distribution of digital signals over standard Category-7A copper cables at speeds beyond 10 Gbps. The main contribution of this paper is on the technical feasibility and system design for data rates of 40 Gbps and 100 Gbps over copper. Based on capacity analysis and rate optimization algorithms, system parameters are obtained and the design implementation trade-offs are discussed. Our simulation results confirm that with the aid of a decision-feedback equalizer and powerful coding techniques, namely, TCM or LDPC code, 40 Gbps transmission is feasible over 50 m of CAT-7A copper cable. These results also indicate that 100 Gbps transmission can be achieved over 15 m cables.