Would it be possible to imagine the same kind of cable but for Thunderbolt 3 ?
We are in 2019, but maybe at some point we could in the future, we could imagine to have a house cabled all around with Thunderbolt 3 instead of Ethernet as it becomes more common to see ?
Thunderbolt was originally intended to be a fully optical interface ("Ligh Peak" was the codename). It turned out to be much more expensive/complicated than Intel/Apple were prepared to deal with, so they came up with a nerfed version of the protocol that ran entirely on copper (today's modern thunderbolt). I haven't heard anything about what happened to the optical half of the interface (the problem with light peak as I understood it was there wasn't an economical way to include power delivery over the same cable, which was an essential feature to compete with USB).
So it's possible to imagine it, but just like with how wireless has essentially eclipsed consumer copper wired ethernet, I think copper has eclipsed short-run consumer optical interfaces. It's just too cheap to use wires over fiber.
I remember it was Intel/Sony back then, and Sony did release one product with such an implementation (The Vaio Z "ultrabook" with an external AMD GPU dock).
The only thing wireless is used for is devices without Ethernet, I will never use wireless on any device that have a wired Ethernet port available, wireless has its uses, but no it has not replaced wired, and I honestly don't see it happening, it is not as secured or fast as wired Ethernet.
For businesses (and me personally) you are absolutely right. However, of friends and family's homes I have been in or help setup networks for I can think of 3 that have anything wired other than the router. My brother who I love, but is a little obsessed, my father who had his house wired with Cat6 when it was built a couple of years ago and one friend who I helped run some cables in to a couple of rooms because WiFi reception was so poor, so I wired up their work computer and an access point in their home office on the other side of their house.
My own house has network drops EVERYWHERE. Hell, when I moved my kitchen I added a network drop behind my fridge...because who knows? Every bedroom has one. My dinning room/kitchen (one large room) have 2. One behind the fridge and 1 behind a table next to that (with AP plugged in to that drop). I have 1 in the nook that the former kitchen was in that is a future home office for my wife. I have 1 in our living room in the built in bookcases for our TV setup. The basement has 4 in the home office down there (partly because my computer setup was on the other side of the room and then I moved it, so I just added 2 more drops on the other side of it and left the existing ones). I have 2 in the main basement itself.
In fact I think the only rooms in the house that don't have network drops are the bathrooms (mudroom/laundry room has one behind the washer and dryer...because again, who knows some day). Oh, the only one in the garage is for the FIOS fiber box to run WAN access to the router in my basement. I could pretty easily run a drop or more in to the garage if I was going to wire something up.
I use wireless only for portable devices that can't be wired. Like tablets and phones. Everything else is wired.
Even a basic GbE connection is a lot faster than wireless. My wife's fairly new laptop is the fastest wireless devices we own and to my AC2600 router it can manage about 70MB/sec if the laptop is in the same room as the AC2600 or AC1750 router/AP. In the bedroom that is currently serving as my wife's home office it is about 35MB/sec down and 25MB/sec up.
That is plenty for most people, but not for me. But I am a little nuts about it. Wiring is easy to do with my house setup and then no sharing of spectrum. If I had to wait for my desktop to push/pull files over wireless, I'd actually ripe hair out. Even in the same room if I ran a 3:3 802.11ac wireless card in my desktop I'd probably hit a wall at around 90-100MB/sec.
I've got 235MB/sec on tap with dual GbE links running.
One major problem is the fragility of fibre. It looks like a wire but the minimum bend radius is much larger. It is also much less resistant to bumps and critically pulling through ducting. We had little success with USB3 over fibre, which works in the lab but is a disaster in a factory.
Compared to a single multicore wire, maybe. But compared to the geometrically complex multi-wire assemblies necessary for high bandwidth interconnects over longer distances (TB3, DispalyPort, HDMI, Cat6A, etc) a single optical fibre pair is FAR more flexible.
The issue isn't flexibility but rather that the highly flexible cable breaks if you use a bend radius under about 10cm. It has its use but I would avoid it given the choice.
>One major problem is the fragility of fibre. It looks like a wire but the minimum bend radius is much larger.
SMF28 has a minimum bend radius of a few millimeters. You can coil it tight around your pinky finger, tighter even than CAT5. The problem isn't bending (it is way more flexible than copper), it is kinking it. Fiber doesn't like being kinked or scratched.
You are thinking of single mode fibre. The USB extenders I have come across have used multi-mode which is easier to couple into but has a larger bend radius. Even single mode SMF-28 has a 4cm long term minimum bend radius so if you coil it tight around your pinky finger it will die with time.
@Sahrin, Light Peak added optical channels to the USB Type-A connector and could leverage the USB VBUS for power. It was never intended to be fully optical. Also, nothing about the protocol was "nerfed". AFAIK, there was literally no change to the host controller silicon. I understand that lasers are cool and all, but for a desktop peripheral interface, optical is not the right choice (unless it's the only choice or silicon photonics become a realistic option). And there was never a competition between Thunderbolt and USB, both of which Intel has a marked interest in. The idea from the start was that they would share the same connector / receptacle, it just took 5 years and the creation of the USB Type-C Cable and Connector Specification to get there.
Not including optical transceivers in every device was the only sane way to proceed, and active cables can use either copper or fiber for the high-speed signaling lanes. Corning, Lintes, and Sumitomo Electric all make optical Thunderbolt 1/2 cables, with OWC, Sonnet, and StarTech having offered their own branded versions. Pushing a 5 V (or even 12 V) power bus down 60m of cable is obviously challenging (you'd need larger than 14 AWG conductors), so I'm not sure what Cosemi has done to make these cables comply with the USB spec. However, they have opted to start with a Type-A to Type-C cable, which simplifies things somewhat.
@Anton Shilov, PVC is incredibly common in both CMR and OFCR cable in the US, and I'm pretty sure it's also used / allowed in plenum rated cables as well. So I'm not sure what they're on about with the no PVC thing, unless it's just to meet European LSZH requirements.
Teflon is supposed to be used in true plenum cabling, to my knowledge. PVC should not be used in a plenum wire, to my knowledge. Or at least something that doesn't release the chemicals PVC does. My understanding is that is the point of plenum.
If you want higher speed than regular Ethernet and want to go down the costly route of active optical cables, you may as well use them for the faster Ethernet standards. The optical part does not really care about the protocol.
Nobody in the industry would want to use thunderbolt as a whole home networking platform. 10Gbe is available over copper, faster/lower latency standards are available over fiber optic but are ridiculously expensive, but regardless Thunderbolt 3 is an expensive interface that has SUBSTANTIAL benefits when it's excessive cost is justified in light of it's bandwidth and power delivery capabilities. Such as a dock for a laptop/micro PC where 100+ watts of power, and 2x 4K60p displays can be connected over a single cable. It's great that Apple was an early adopter of Intel's interface standard, and it's a shame that more Wintel providers don't use it and instead try to push USB-C as a viable docking standard, but let's be reasonable as to the real-world use cases Thunderbolt was designed for. Whole home networking is not even remotely what Thunderbolt is designed to do.
IMO, DP-Alt + USB-C PD will be more than enough for most people.
Of course, DP-Alt on most Intel laptops is gimped to DP1.2...
eGPU really only benefits users who really want a laptop with a GPU, but cannot actually have a GPU in a laptop. Outside of Apple, small laptops with GPUs are not uncommon. Inside the ~7% marketshare of Apple, choices are extremely limited.
So I put my PC in the basement and run USB and display wires up through the walls into the computer room to the desk where I have a USB hub and monitors.
similar case here. For LAN parties, one very capable machine is in another room, and a PITA to move. I keep a spare monitor, keyboard and mouse in the gaming room, and when LANs happen run 50 foot cables from that machine into the spare KBM. It's all analog: ps/2 for keyboard and mouse, vga for video and regular audio jack. Most digital stuff just doesn't go that far, without repeaters or optical or whatever
You'd probably spend less in both time and money just building a silent PC. It's not hard to do these days, lots of SFF cases, power supplies and system fans are available for such projects. Mine is silent, the power supply fan won't spin up unless under heavy load (and that's usually when gaming and so I can't hear it anyway), same is true of the GPU fan, and the CPU fan is a low rotation Noctua that does a great job. Can't hear my system even with your head against it for normal desktop use.
You can easily run HDMI and USB both over Cat 5e or Cat 6 cables, both have cheap converters to RJ45. It won't be Ethernet, it uses them as convenient very high bandwidth cabling.
There is a lot of interest in optical USB for things like industrial equipment where you want to be electrically isolated AND to have long cable runs from a piece of machinery to a control system. Industry is driving demand for these. Probably makes sense to also sell the same parts to consumers who want to do long cable runs of USB, so no surprise someone is reselling industrial parts back to consumers.
Yeah. That bit didn't sound super-interesting to me. Maybe Russia is not considered part of EMEA for this purpose? Although a lot of it is Asia as well as Europe.
Depending on price, robustness and reliability, this could be of interest for digital video, especially on-site recording and backups. Along that line, a TB 3 optical could be useful, too. A key issue with USB 3 and up (3.1, other flavors) is that the ability to transmit at really high data rates diminishes quickly with distance starting at 50 cm. But, for this cable here to hold up, it needs to be mechanically robust, have some abrasion resistance, basically survive at least some abuse to be field-worthy. Unrelated to the optical here, does anybody here have experiences/recommendations for a significantly cheaper, shorter distance solution for USB 3.1, so about 1.5 - 3 meters long, maybe just with thicker copper wiring?
Also Cosemi will be expensive with Made in China because President Trump jack up the Tariffs on Chinese goods. That way if stuff will be Made in USA, stuff made in USA will be cheaper.
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Diogene7 - Tuesday, February 12, 2019 - link
Would it be possible to imagine the same kind of cable but for Thunderbolt 3 ?We are in 2019, but maybe at some point we could in the future, we could imagine to have a house cabled all around with Thunderbolt 3 instead of Ethernet as it becomes more common to see ?
Sahrin - Tuesday, February 12, 2019 - link
Thunderbolt was originally intended to be a fully optical interface ("Ligh Peak" was the codename). It turned out to be much more expensive/complicated than Intel/Apple were prepared to deal with, so they came up with a nerfed version of the protocol that ran entirely on copper (today's modern thunderbolt). I haven't heard anything about what happened to the optical half of the interface (the problem with light peak as I understood it was there wasn't an economical way to include power delivery over the same cable, which was an essential feature to compete with USB).So it's possible to imagine it, but just like with how wireless has essentially eclipsed consumer copper wired ethernet, I think copper has eclipsed short-run consumer optical interfaces. It's just too cheap to use wires over fiber.
Billy Tallis - Tuesday, February 12, 2019 - link
Corning made optical TB1/TB2 cables up to 60m long, but I haven't seen any optical TB3 cables.jeremyshaw - Tuesday, February 12, 2019 - link
I remember it was Intel/Sony back then, and Sony did release one product with such an implementation (The Vaio Z "ultrabook" with an external AMD GPU dock).https://www.anandtech.com/show/4474/sony-updates-v...
jeremyshaw - Tuesday, February 12, 2019 - link
I see, Apple was still involved.marte_91 - Tuesday, February 12, 2019 - link
The only thing wireless is used for is devices without Ethernet, I will never use wireless on any device that have a wired Ethernet port available, wireless has its uses, but no it has not replaced wired, and I honestly don't see it happening, it is not as secured or fast as wired Ethernet.close - Wednesday, February 13, 2019 - link
Yeah well... we live in a world in which convenience wins over security, and very few people need that speed. So there's that.azazel1024 - Wednesday, February 13, 2019 - link
For businesses (and me personally) you are absolutely right. However, of friends and family's homes I have been in or help setup networks for I can think of 3 that have anything wired other than the router. My brother who I love, but is a little obsessed, my father who had his house wired with Cat6 when it was built a couple of years ago and one friend who I helped run some cables in to a couple of rooms because WiFi reception was so poor, so I wired up their work computer and an access point in their home office on the other side of their house.My own house has network drops EVERYWHERE. Hell, when I moved my kitchen I added a network drop behind my fridge...because who knows? Every bedroom has one. My dinning room/kitchen (one large room) have 2. One behind the fridge and 1 behind a table next to that (with AP plugged in to that drop). I have 1 in the nook that the former kitchen was in that is a future home office for my wife. I have 1 in our living room in the built in bookcases for our TV setup. The basement has 4 in the home office down there (partly because my computer setup was on the other side of the room and then I moved it, so I just added 2 more drops on the other side of it and left the existing ones). I have 2 in the main basement itself.
In fact I think the only rooms in the house that don't have network drops are the bathrooms (mudroom/laundry room has one behind the washer and dryer...because again, who knows some day). Oh, the only one in the garage is for the FIOS fiber box to run WAN access to the router in my basement. I could pretty easily run a drop or more in to the garage if I was going to wire something up.
I use wireless only for portable devices that can't be wired. Like tablets and phones. Everything else is wired.
Even a basic GbE connection is a lot faster than wireless. My wife's fairly new laptop is the fastest wireless devices we own and to my AC2600 router it can manage about 70MB/sec if the laptop is in the same room as the AC2600 or AC1750 router/AP. In the bedroom that is currently serving as my wife's home office it is about 35MB/sec down and 25MB/sec up.
That is plenty for most people, but not for me. But I am a little nuts about it. Wiring is easy to do with my house setup and then no sharing of spectrum. If I had to wait for my desktop to push/pull files over wireless, I'd actually ripe hair out. Even in the same room if I ran a 3:3 802.11ac wireless card in my desktop I'd probably hit a wall at around 90-100MB/sec.
I've got 235MB/sec on tap with dual GbE links running.
And it isn't shared.
BedfordTim - Wednesday, February 13, 2019 - link
One major problem is the fragility of fibre. It looks like a wire but the minimum bend radius is much larger. It is also much less resistant to bumps and critically pulling through ducting. We had little success with USB3 over fibre, which works in the lab but is a disaster in a factory.edzieba - Wednesday, February 13, 2019 - link
Compared to a single multicore wire, maybe. But compared to the geometrically complex multi-wire assemblies necessary for high bandwidth interconnects over longer distances (TB3, DispalyPort, HDMI, Cat6A, etc) a single optical fibre pair is FAR more flexible.BedfordTim - Thursday, February 14, 2019 - link
The issue isn't flexibility but rather that the highly flexible cable breaks if you use a bend radius under about 10cm. It has its use but I would avoid it given the choice.saratoga4 - Wednesday, February 13, 2019 - link
>One major problem is the fragility of fibre. It looks like a wire but the minimum bend radius is much larger.SMF28 has a minimum bend radius of a few millimeters. You can coil it tight around your pinky finger, tighter even than CAT5. The problem isn't bending (it is way more flexible than copper), it is kinking it. Fiber doesn't like being kinked or scratched.
BedfordTim - Thursday, February 14, 2019 - link
You are thinking of single mode fibre. The USB extenders I have come across have used multi-mode which is easier to couple into but has a larger bend radius. Even single mode SMF-28 has a 4cm long term minimum bend radius so if you coil it tight around your pinky finger it will die with time.repoman27 - Wednesday, February 13, 2019 - link
@Sahrin, Light Peak added optical channels to the USB Type-A connector and could leverage the USB VBUS for power. It was never intended to be fully optical. Also, nothing about the protocol was "nerfed". AFAIK, there was literally no change to the host controller silicon. I understand that lasers are cool and all, but for a desktop peripheral interface, optical is not the right choice (unless it's the only choice or silicon photonics become a realistic option). And there was never a competition between Thunderbolt and USB, both of which Intel has a marked interest in. The idea from the start was that they would share the same connector / receptacle, it just took 5 years and the creation of the USB Type-C Cable and Connector Specification to get there.Not including optical transceivers in every device was the only sane way to proceed, and active cables can use either copper or fiber for the high-speed signaling lanes. Corning, Lintes, and Sumitomo Electric all make optical Thunderbolt 1/2 cables, with OWC, Sonnet, and StarTech having offered their own branded versions. Pushing a 5 V (or even 12 V) power bus down 60m of cable is obviously challenging (you'd need larger than 14 AWG conductors), so I'm not sure what Cosemi has done to make these cables comply with the USB spec. However, they have opted to start with a Type-A to Type-C cable, which simplifies things somewhat.
@Anton Shilov, PVC is incredibly common in both CMR and OFCR cable in the US, and I'm pretty sure it's also used / allowed in plenum rated cables as well. So I'm not sure what they're on about with the no PVC thing, unless it's just to meet European LSZH requirements.
teldar - Wednesday, February 13, 2019 - link
Teflon is supposed to be used in true plenum cabling, to my knowledge. PVC should not be used in a plenum wire, to my knowledge. Or at least something that doesn't release the chemicals PVC does. My understanding is that is the point of plenum.MrSpadge - Tuesday, February 12, 2019 - link
If you want higher speed than regular Ethernet and want to go down the costly route of active optical cables, you may as well use them for the faster Ethernet standards. The optical part does not really care about the protocol.c4v3man - Tuesday, February 12, 2019 - link
Found the Apple user...Nobody in the industry would want to use thunderbolt as a whole home networking platform. 10Gbe is available over copper, faster/lower latency standards are available over fiber optic but are ridiculously expensive, but regardless Thunderbolt 3 is an expensive interface that has SUBSTANTIAL benefits when it's excessive cost is justified in light of it's bandwidth and power delivery capabilities. Such as a dock for a laptop/micro PC where 100+ watts of power, and 2x 4K60p displays can be connected over a single cable. It's great that Apple was an early adopter of Intel's interface standard, and it's a shame that more Wintel providers don't use it and instead try to push USB-C as a viable docking standard, but let's be reasonable as to the real-world use cases Thunderbolt was designed for. Whole home networking is not even remotely what Thunderbolt is designed to do.
jeremyshaw - Tuesday, February 12, 2019 - link
IMO, DP-Alt + USB-C PD will be more than enough for most people.Of course, DP-Alt on most Intel laptops is gimped to DP1.2...
eGPU really only benefits users who really want a laptop with a GPU, but cannot actually have a GPU in a laptop. Outside of Apple, small laptops with GPUs are not uncommon. Inside the ~7% marketshare of Apple, choices are extremely limited.
star-affinity - Wednesday, February 13, 2019 - link
So a built-in GPU can compete with a desktop size one in an external case? Seems legit. ;)star-affinity - Wednesday, February 13, 2019 - link
But I agree hardware options in the Apple camp are too limited. Still like that eGPUs are embraced.boozed - Tuesday, February 12, 2019 - link
What is something like this used for?yzzir - Tuesday, February 12, 2019 - link
I could see this being useful for high bandwidth USB cameras or other video interfaces using usb-c alt mode.BedfordTim - Wednesday, February 13, 2019 - link
In theory yet, but in practice it has been an expensive nightmare. My advice is stick with GigE unless you are really desperate.SirMaster - Tuesday, February 12, 2019 - link
I like a "silent" PC.So I put my PC in the basement and run USB and display wires up through the walls into the computer room to the desk where I have a USB hub and monitors.
BedfordTim - Wednesday, February 13, 2019 - link
Check the bend radius. On the older versions we used this would have been challenging at best. This is also a lot more expensive than cat 6 cable.MamiyaOtaru - Wednesday, February 13, 2019 - link
similar case here. For LAN parties, one very capable machine is in another room, and a PITA to move. I keep a spare monitor, keyboard and mouse in the gaming room, and when LANs happen run 50 foot cables from that machine into the spare KBM. It's all analog: ps/2 for keyboard and mouse, vga for video and regular audio jack. Most digital stuff just doesn't go that far, without repeaters or optical or whateverReflex - Wednesday, February 13, 2019 - link
You'd probably spend less in both time and money just building a silent PC. It's not hard to do these days, lots of SFF cases, power supplies and system fans are available for such projects. Mine is silent, the power supply fan won't spin up unless under heavy load (and that's usually when gaming and so I can't hear it anyway), same is true of the GPU fan, and the CPU fan is a low rotation Noctua that does a great job. Can't hear my system even with your head against it for normal desktop use.chx1975 - Thursday, February 14, 2019 - link
You can easily run HDMI and USB both over Cat 5e or Cat 6 cables, both have cheap converters to RJ45. It won't be Ethernet, it uses them as convenient very high bandwidth cabling.saratoga4 - Wednesday, February 13, 2019 - link
There is a lot of interest in optical USB for things like industrial equipment where you want to be electrically isolated AND to have long cable runs from a piece of machinery to a control system. Industry is driving demand for these. Probably makes sense to also sell the same parts to consumers who want to do long cable runs of USB, so no surprise someone is reselling industrial parts back to consumers.boozed - Friday, February 15, 2019 - link
That might explain the complete lack of application examples in the marketing material. If you have to ask... you don't need it.stanleyipkiss - Tuesday, February 12, 2019 - link
What is the latency?SirMaster - Tuesday, February 12, 2019 - link
Microseconds.The USB protocol wont tolerate more than that so it can't be more than that.
name99 - Tuesday, February 12, 2019 - link
"As it turns out, this is a requirement for in-wall cables in the Americas, EMEA and Asia,"Isn't it simpler to just say that this is a world-wide requirement? Where exactly DOESN'T fit into "the Americas, EMEA and Asia"? Antarctica? Rockets?
b0e57d1d - Tuesday, February 12, 2019 - link
Australia and nearby island countries.boozed - Friday, February 15, 2019 - link
Australia and/or Oceania are often lumped under Asia for distribution.And Australia's electrical standards are pretty similar to those in Europe.
GreenReaper - Wednesday, February 13, 2019 - link
Yeah. That bit didn't sound super-interesting to me. Maybe Russia is not considered part of EMEA for this purpose? Although a lot of it is Asia as well as Europe.eastcoast_pete - Wednesday, February 13, 2019 - link
Depending on price, robustness and reliability, this could be of interest for digital video, especially on-site recording and backups. Along that line, a TB 3 optical could be useful, too. A key issue with USB 3 and up (3.1, other flavors) is that the ability to transmit at really high data rates diminishes quickly with distance starting at 50 cm. But, for this cable here to hold up, it needs to be mechanically robust, have some abrasion resistance, basically survive at least some abuse to be field-worthy. Unrelated to the optical here, does anybody here have experiences/recommendations for a significantly cheaper, shorter distance solution for USB 3.1, so about 1.5 - 3 meters long, maybe just with thicker copper wiring?Ultra2SE213FanTC - Sunday, May 5, 2019 - link
Don't buy from Cosemi! They are a private company that doesn't cater to consumers!Ultra2SE213FanTC - Monday, May 6, 2019 - link
Also Cosemi will be expensive with Made in China because President Trump jack up the Tariffs on Chinese goods. That way if stuff will be Made in USA, stuff made in USA will be cheaper.