Corning Announces Availability of USB 3.Optical Cables

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knowom

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Wonder how quick these would be at 3 meters for a crossover cable granted they'd still be expensive at like $40's a cable approximately.
 

BoredSysAdmin

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How many true usb 3.0 10m/30ft cables you've seen sold ? (besides this one)
Corning knows they have a monopoly (at least for now) and price reflects it
 

Shankovich

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Oh come on guys the price of fibre optic audio cables is like $10 for a 3 footer. I'm sure the signal converter hardware isn't that expensive either. Way to take advantage of being first.
 
Oh come on guys the price of fibre optic audio cables is like $10 for a 3 footer. I'm sure the signal converter hardware isn't that expensive either. Way to take advantage of being first.

This cable is 10m, which is 30 feet, so at your pricing, 30 feet equals 10x$10 cable, $100 and they are charging $109. Doesn't seem to be taking advantage of anything.


This is cool and all, but who who cares if a USB cable is lighter, and for that price I'd rather wait a few minutes with the slower transfer speed.

It's not about speed, it's about length. Copper cables start to slow down at 3m, this one is 10m and going up to 30m. You can't have a 90 foot USB 3.0 copper cable, period. This serves a purpose for people that need to plug in devices far away from the computer.

Somebody does not understand economics.
Why because they are creating a product that copper cable can't fill? It's a 30 foot optical cable.
 

dragonsqrrl

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It weighs 1/5th of a normal USB 3.0 cable at only 20x the price!
Err, not really. It's a 10m cable, good luck finding a standard copper version of that. And when you actually compare the price per m with existing USB 3 cables you're really not paying that much more, definitely nowhere near 20x.

The only real drawback I can see with optical USB 3 is it can't carry power, but I don't think that's much of a concern for the types of applications this cable would be used in.
 

InvalidError

Titan
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Those cables have integrated USB3/USB2 bridges in their plugs to cram everything into (probably) a single fiber. You won't be getting any better speeds with shorter cables.

What sort of bandwidth the fiber itself can handle depends on what Corning actually chose to use in those. Since 100GBase-SR4 can do 25Gbps per multi-mode fiber over 100m, speeds in the neighborhood of 500Gbps would probably be possible at 3m if there was a cost-effective and efficient way of modulating light that fast.
 
@getochkn

It is about speed though, speed at long cable distances so you do not start getting transfer speed degradation.

For 110 dollars it's a waste of money when you can buy a 10 meter USB extension cable with a Power Amplifier AC Adapter for only 60 dollars or less.

Who is actually using USB for transferring data at large distances like that anyway with you can use Ethernet or other methods. I would definitely buy these if the price was more reasonable, but USB heads are a few bucks, a 35 foot optical cable is like 10-15, and whatever other parts they needed for the cable couldn't have been that much more.
 

InvalidError

Titan
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The biggest issue is production volume: how many thousands of units of these is Corning going to sell when so few people are likely to need 10-30m cables? Setting up the production line costs a small fortune and the cost has to be amortized over whatever the production run is expected to be. For shorter distances, not many people are going to be willing to pay any sort of premium over plain passive USB3 cables.

Corning's fancy fiber USB3 cable is a niche product so it gets niche pricing.
 
That is a very good point InvalidError, but if they were to sell them at a decent price they could easily mass produce them. I really wonder who exactly will use this device, I can't image a useful scenario.
 

InvalidError

Titan
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They can mass-produce them but they also need to be able to mass-sell them.

If you look at cheap Chinese SFP+ optics, we are still talking around $30 for almost raw 1Gbps optics. For a USB2+USB3 hybrid optical cable, you need the hybrid module at both ends of the cable and those modules need to operate at ~5.5Gbps.

Since the USB cable does not need the precision LC, SC or similar connectors, lets say this reduces the fiber termination cost by $10 at each end, maybe another $5 reduction from not needing the SFP+ form-factor, EEPROM, connector, etc. We are still talking about a ~$30 cable cost overhead mostly due to active components and mechanical complexity.

Very few people are going to be willing to pay ~$40 for a cable that does almost exactly the same thing (minus electrical isolation) as a $5-10 cable unless they absolutely need more than 4m/12' or electrical isolation.
 

InvalidError

Titan
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Plug a USB3 hub in the USB3 extension, now you can use a remote USB3 display.

Since USB3 has enough bandwidth to stream raw HD, USB3 displays could potentially do DMA streaming straight from the GPU, which would be a nice upgrade from dumb frame buffers most use today.
 

netmind

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Now you can pay $100 for piece of wire, er, glass :). But wait, Ethernet can work over 100 meters, can transfer anything, and 30 meter cable would be waaaaaaaaay cheaper than $100.
 

InvalidError

Titan
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If you want to do 5Gbps on Ethernet, you will need to get 10GbE cards in each PC at ~$200 a pop, which is a fair bit more expensive than a $100 cable... and you still need that 30m of cat6a or better wiring which is going to add another ~$30. All inclusive, you are looking at something like $430 for 10GbE vs $100 for fancy optical USB3 cable.
 


You won't benefit much from a cable over 1Gbps as write speeds on the mechanical hard drive is limited.

If you need the ability to transfer that much data then you likely are a business who isn't going to use a USB cable as the method to transfer data.

You can get a 50 foot cat6a cable for 16 dollars on amazon.

 

InvalidError

Titan
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Some people have SSDs and RAID arrays.

As for your $16 50' Amazon cable, keep in mind that 30m is ~98'. There aren't many 100' cat6 or better cables on Amazon under $35.
 


Yea, but people doing those type of setups too wouldn't do something like use USB optical cable.

Amazon has 100 foot cat6a cables for 25 dollars.
 

InvalidError

Titan
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Which is close enough to the $30 I quoted and I doubt a $25 cable using #26 wires will perform as good on signal integrity as a Belden cable using #23 or Monoprice's #24. I would not be surprised if the cheap 100' (and longer) cables only met 10GBase-T requirements when connected directly to both endpoints.
 

Victor McDaniels

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I love how many people here seem to know so much about everything. Now, for those of us in the professional video editing field, doing 4K video for dozens of customers, it's not feasible to have a RAID in every edit bay, and it's painful to render RAW video over gigabit copper. But since every here knows the answer, please forward me your resume, so you can help those of us who spend 70-80 hours a week trying to make this stuff work. Oh wait... it'd be cheaper just to buy a $100 Corning fiber USB 3.0 cable (actually, we're getting the $300 Thunderbolt ones, but that's splitting hairs).

So, for the rest of us, this is great technology we would gladly pay double the price for. For those of you who need to plug a 1 TB drive into your computer to watch your torrent movies, yeah, this isn't worth the money. But this company is not trying to sell to you. But, please don't assume you speak for the rest of the computing world, thank you.
 


+1

Just because someone can't see a use for it with regards to Battlefield 4, it's overpriced and pointless. I used to do a lot of audio work and with something like this, being able to place the USB audio interface or control surface far from the PC eliminates any noise and/or interference from the PC work have rocked back in the day. My old interface would loose sound quality or glitch out after 2 USB extensions.

But it doesn't benefit watching Simpsons reruns, so it's stupid.
 
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