6 ms·

I still desperately wish the industry had been able to push through to an optical data + plain power interconnect standard ages ago instead of it falling apart.

by xoa 3y ago

I still desperately wish the industry had been able to push through to an optical data + plain power interconnect standard ages ago instead of it falling apart. It's so pleasant to deal with fiber. The same OS2 or OM3 I installed over a decade ago for 10 Gbps is still fine for 40 or 100 Gbps. Cost was a complaint at one point, yet even without the enormous economies of scale a general standard would bring price and performance lines have ended up converging anyway. 40G SR (so still good to 150m) modules are now at $40 or less, even 100G is less than $100. Putting that onto simpler fiber instead of MTP/MPO with SFP56 remains much more expensive, a 50G-SR is still like $280, but that appears to primarily be a product of it being very new and not yet scaled, not that it couldn't have been years ago. And that still then runs to 100m with duplex LC. Meanwhile, Apple wants $70 a pop for a single, 1m Thunderbolt 4 cable, and that's only been increasing. What will Thunderbolt 5 be? Corning and I think one other briefly did optical Thunderbolt cables, but those were $500-1000. Whereas premade quality duplex OM4 with helical steel armor runs more like $2.20/meter. Feels like we somehow ended up in a yet another technology path dependent evolution path where decisions that saved a bit at the time have then imposed major costs forever more :(. Man it'd be so cool to just be able to run a screen and input boxes hundreds of feet away from a workstation for $60, or have an $8-12 cable be good for decades of evolution in bandwidth barring regular wear (and when it's that cheap who cares even if it breaks after 5 years?), or be able to route displays/TVs and PCIe and whatever else around like any other networking with no compromises. Sigh.

BiteCode_dev 3y ago
Fiber doesn't bend well, which for a cable that will be moved regularly by ordinary customers, is game over.
- kllrnohj 3y ago
  It bends just fine. There's tons of fiber cables for "ordinary users" including HDMI, DisplayPort, Thunderbolt, VR link cables, and, of course, toslink. You just end up with the extra cost and complexity of having transceivers built into the cable which is a waste especially at these speeds where copper is clearly a limitation.
  - gregsadetsky 3y ago
    I didn’t know about fiber HDMI, DisplayPort or Thunderbolt…! Are these used for very long runs - as in a video source to a projector (via hdmi) hundreds of meters away, like in a stadium..? Thank you!
    - mlyle 3y ago
      8m or so is the limit for HDMI passive cables being 100% reliable. If you want to go 15-30m--- using a video source from another part of your house, or to drive a projector in the middle of a classroom--- and you buy an "active cable", odds are it's fiber optic inside. If you want to go hundreds of meters away, you'll get a purpose-built box that uses your own optical cables instead of a cable that hides the optical transceivers inside.
    - tuetuopay 3y ago
      Those are used in multiple cases: - long runs that are not that long. hdmi does not like long cables at all. even an overhead projector in a classroom requires super expensive cables (ever wondered why it's still mostly vga?) - packing multiple displays in a single cable. fiber is so thin that with trunk cables you get a lot of strands in a single cable, capable of running a lot of displays - just getting a really thin cable that can be run in existing conduits or hard to reach places I did buy such a cable for home for the third reason, to run from the PC in the office to the TV in the living room. It runs on a bog standard OM3 MPO cable. The specific one I got comes from HeyOptics and their website already showcases a few usecases [1]. (not affiliated, just a great product that just works) As for stadiums and more generally broadcast video, they're using SDI instead of HDMI. Those are indeed most of the time fiber, both for range and weight (think of the cameraman running along the terrain during a sport event, and their long tail of cables). When they use HDMI it's more in the control room. [1]: https://www.heyoptics.net/products/8k-hdmi-mpo-optical-cable https://www.heyoptics.net/products/8k-hdmi-mpo-optical-cable (edit: fixed list formatting, I always forget this is not markdown)
    - macNchz 3y ago
      I have a 50 foot fiber HDMI cable to get 4k/120hz signal from the PC in my home office to the TV in the living room. Works great!
- xoa 3y ago
  >Fiber doesn't bend well Eh? Typical min bend radius is like 10x diameter in static conditions, so for a 2mm fiber cable that'd be 20mm or ~0.8". That's not an issue at all with consumer usage, and if you're really worried is trivially solved by just building the thing up to the level of thickness Thunderbolt cables have already. That's why Corning for example advertised their old TB optical cables as "zero bend radius" [0], adding more polymer/armor around a fiber cable so that someone can do whatever with it and it naturally won't go out of spec isn't a big deal. FWIW, anecdotally high performance copper doesn't like abnormal use either. 10g USB-C cables are cheap enough that I tried taking one and using a vice grip to actually really squash thing at an angle, and it didn't like that at all in terms of working reliably afterwards. I doubt DP, HDMI and the like would do better, and those are plenty thick too. It never comes up though in normal use. And when cables are cheap vs stupid pricey making a mistake no longer is such a big deal. If you use an $8 cable a bit too hard and it stops working, well grab another one out of the drawer. If your $70 cable breaks that's a touch worse. ---- 0: https://www.corning.com/microsites/coc/ocbc/Documents/CNT-008-A4-BEN.pdf https://www.corning.com/microsites/coc/ocbc/Documents/CNT-00...
  - lostlogin 3y ago
    I’m with you and want more fibre, but people are brutal on hardware. I’ve been involved in the replacement of two fibre optic cables at work, used for pulse oximetry in an MR scanner. It was very expensive, twice. People force a bend and destroy them. It doesn’t matter what you tell people, they break them.
    - zamadatix 3y ago
      Was in healthcare IT as well: https://www.fs.com/products/41028.html?attribute=35025&id=615202 https://www.fs.com/products/41028.html?attribute=35025&id=61... for a couple of dollars you can get 2 paths of crush protected bend insensitive high speed fiber that barely degrades signal quality when you knot it up. To get around the limitations of the LC connector and wall jacks being regularly obliterated by equipment/tables being moved around use recessed jacks, that way they just pass by instead of break the connector (applies to rj45 as well). We had great success with this approach for a couple thousand locations. Of course, the real problem 95% of the time is really around the device not the technology the device uses. There is a misalignment of incentives on who can work on the device, whether standard parts are used, and whether the approved parts are the $2 type solution that will cost $800 in on site contractor fees to replace again or the $4 solution which actually stands a chance to being used. Once the device is bought nobody is going to be incented or allowed to do anything but fix it to status quo. It's one reason I had to get out of healthcare IT - it was more often the system getting in the way of what patients and nurses needed to do than the actual technology itself so solving things from a technology perspective felt like running on a treadmill and going nowhere.
- vinay_ys 3y ago
  We have FTTH everywhere in India and seeing how fiber is installed in all kinds of nooks and crannies, I can tell you that fiber is more resilient than you think. And frankly, I have experienced far less Internet outages with FTTH than I used to with twisted copper pairs (ADSL2+).
  - dagmx 3y ago
    How thick are those cables versus standard consumer cables?
    - InvaderFizz 3y ago
      Most GPON is quite thin. Thinner and tougher than standard fiber patch cables.
    - pzmarzly 3y ago
      I don't know if this is a helpful comparison for you, but my FTTH cable is almost identical size and material-wise to Apple EarPods cable. Has been working fine for years now, though obviously I don't move the router that much.
    - vinay_ys 3y ago
      G.657B standard cables have a pulling (stress) bend radius of 5mm. So, you can abuse it quite a bit and it's fine. Also, while it is abused during installation, at rest, it is not under so much stress and usually have a sturdy casing to make sure it stays above its min bend radius.
- chrischen 3y ago
  The Meta Quest link cable is optical and way more than 1m long.
- solarkraft 3y ago
  Fiber cables are often more flexible than copper ones by virtue of just being a lot thinner.
  - lxgr 3y ago
    Which exacerbates the problem of users easily exceeding the minimum allowable bending radius.
jauntywundrkind 3y ago
USB is still (as far as I know) a mess and that sucks. But DisplayPort has great optical cables available! I was early in & they were very cheap then (no one trusted them yet), 50m v1.4 for $60. Turns out to be vastly longer than I needed, & got a 20m cable for gaming from the roof. There's even DP 2.1 cables now. A USB4 with optical transport would be divine.
- lxgr 3y ago
  There are optical USB-C cables available! The standard explicitly supports that use case.
- sagz 3y ago
  Meta/Oculus makes a 5m optical USBC cable https://www.meta.com/quest/accessories/link-cable/ https://www.meta.com/quest/accessories/link-cable/ USB 3.2 Gen 1 though, not USB 4
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
Aurornis 3y ago
> It's so pleasant to deal with fiber. Consumers are absolutely brutal to cables. Minimum bend radius of copper cables get violated all the time, but copper has a decent chance of continuing to work if bent back. Not so with fiber. Fiber would only work with some heavy armor. Consumer fiber was actually tried in the past: Optical TOSLINK was briefly popular in the audio world. It was cheap relative to what you’d need for modern high speed fiber, but even that was too much to win out over copper. It faded away. Even within professionally maintained data centers, direct attach copper is often preferred over fiber interconnects when it’s possible to get away with it. Fiber is great when called for, but copper wins in practicality when you can get away with it. It’s been proven over and over again across industries. > Meanwhile, Apple wants $70 a pop for a single, 1m Thunderbolt 4 cable, and that's only been increasing. You picked the absolute most expensive cable as your benchmark. Look anywhere else and prices are lower and decreasing. Also, you are wrong about Apple cable prices increasing. They’ve actually dropped the price of their longer cables. But again, look to the overall market and you’ll see prices going down.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >Consumer fiber was actually tried in the past: [...] It faded away. Not everywhere. It's still not as popular as copper but it's not extinct.
- ender341341 3y ago
  to be fair TOSLINK was a particularly bad standard and offers lower audio quality to similar or cheaper analogue devices. It's whole selling point was basically "it's fiber optic so that makes it better" while not actually being better.
  - yummypaint 3y ago
    It's literally the exact same digital signal sent over copper S/PDIF. The only meaningful advantage it offers is electrical isolation.
    - xnzakg 3y ago
Someone 3y ago
Would high speed optical work for connections that require regular unplugging? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOSLINK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOSLINK and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADAT_Lightpipe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADAT_Lightpipe are limited to about a megabyte/second, if I’m doing my math right. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MADI#Sampling_frequency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MADI#Sampling_frequency gets higher, at around 12 megabytes/second. That still is at least a factor of 100 away from this cable. I think that’s because it isn’t easy to make a plug that works reliably for a gigabytes per second fiber cable.
- lwkl 3y ago
  You would need a new connector because dust can break the signal and a cable that needs a dust cap sounds like a horrible consumer product.
  - mensetmanusman 3y ago
    3M is on the bleeding edge here: https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/data-center-us/applications/interconnect-optical/ https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/data-center-us/applications/inte... used in ai data centers, probably years away from consumer adoption...
gatkinso 3y ago
This is my dream. To those worried about bending, I would be really curious to try one of these with levels of sheathing to see how they hold up in reality.
spicyjpeg 3y ago
Alec from Technology Connections covered the topic of consumer optical standards - or rather, the lack thereof - in a video that's now 4 years old: https://youtube.com/watch?v=CwZdur1Pi3M https://youtube.com/watch?v=CwZdur1Pi3M It mostly boils down to the reason others already mentioned: fragility, cost (optical transceivers have only recently become cheap enough to enable the use case of optical cables that behave like copper ones) and the requirement for copper wires anyway in order to carry power in addition to data.
kalleboo 3y ago
Everyone else is talking about bend radius but as someone who has abused fiber (just your standard cheap 10Gtek patch cables from Amazon) that's not the problem, modern fiber is quite bend-resistant. The problem is the ends. Inside each fiber plug is an exposed fiber. Dust is a huge problem if you expect users to toss the cables in their bag, and worse is damage to the exposed ends of the fiber which can get chipped and then then in turn damage the exposed fiber in the device you're plugging into. It would be cool if instead of those active Corning cables you could just get an active Thunderbolt-to-SMF plug, and then bring your own cables. Then the expensive part (the conversion circuitry and optical transceiver) can be reused for different applications and you just replace the cheap fiber with whatever length you want (or use pre-existing fiber in your home and update the optical transceivers when a new standard comes out and not have to re-wire) edit: thinking about it more, it would have been a lot cooler if instead of thunderbolt we just got a better Ethernet. Then we could use any medium we wanted to.

by xoa 3y ago

BiteCode_dev 3y ago

Fiber doesn't bend well, which for a cable that will be moved regularly by ordinary customers, is game over.

kllrnohj 3y ago
It bends just fine. There's tons of fiber cables for "ordinary users" including HDMI, DisplayPort, Thunderbolt, VR link cables, and, of course, toslink. You just end up with the extra cost and complexity of having transceivers built into the cable which is a waste especially at these speeds where copper is clearly a limitation.
- gregsadetsky 3y ago
  I didn’t know about fiber HDMI, DisplayPort or Thunderbolt…! Are these used for very long runs - as in a video source to a projector (via hdmi) hundreds of meters away, like in a stadium..? Thank you!
  - mlyle 3y ago
    8m or so is the limit for HDMI passive cables being 100% reliable. If you want to go 15-30m--- using a video source from another part of your house, or to drive a projector in the middle of a classroom--- and you buy an "active cable", odds are it's fiber optic inside. If you want to go hundreds of meters away, you'll get a purpose-built box that uses your own optical cables instead of a cable that hides the optical transceivers inside.
  - tuetuopay 3y ago
    Those are used in multiple cases: - long runs that are not that long. hdmi does not like long cables at all. even an overhead projector in a classroom requires super expensive cables (ever wondered why it's still mostly vga?) - packing multiple displays in a single cable. fiber is so thin that with trunk cables you get a lot of strands in a single cable, capable of running a lot of displays - just getting a really thin cable that can be run in existing conduits or hard to reach places I did buy such a cable for home for the third reason, to run from the PC in the office to the TV in the living room. It runs on a bog standard OM3 MPO cable. The specific one I got comes from HeyOptics and their website already showcases a few usecases [1]. (not affiliated, just a great product that just works) As for stadiums and more generally broadcast video, they're using SDI instead of HDMI. Those are indeed most of the time fiber, both for range and weight (think of the cameraman running along the terrain during a sport event, and their long tail of cables). When they use HDMI it's more in the control room. [1]: https://www.heyoptics.net/products/8k-hdmi-mpo-optical-cable https://www.heyoptics.net/products/8k-hdmi-mpo-optical-cable (edit: fixed list formatting, I always forget this is not markdown)
  - macNchz 3y ago
    I have a 50 foot fiber HDMI cable to get 4k/120hz signal from the PC in my home office to the TV in the living room. Works great!
xoa 3y ago
>Fiber doesn't bend well Eh? Typical min bend radius is like 10x diameter in static conditions, so for a 2mm fiber cable that'd be 20mm or ~0.8". That's not an issue at all with consumer usage, and if you're really worried is trivially solved by just building the thing up to the level of thickness Thunderbolt cables have already. That's why Corning for example advertised their old TB optical cables as "zero bend radius" [0], adding more polymer/armor around a fiber cable so that someone can do whatever with it and it naturally won't go out of spec isn't a big deal. FWIW, anecdotally high performance copper doesn't like abnormal use either. 10g USB-C cables are cheap enough that I tried taking one and using a vice grip to actually really squash thing at an angle, and it didn't like that at all in terms of working reliably afterwards. I doubt DP, HDMI and the like would do better, and those are plenty thick too. It never comes up though in normal use. And when cables are cheap vs stupid pricey making a mistake no longer is such a big deal. If you use an $8 cable a bit too hard and it stops working, well grab another one out of the drawer. If your $70 cable breaks that's a touch worse. ---- 0: https://www.corning.com/microsites/coc/ocbc/Documents/CNT-008-A4-BEN.pdf https://www.corning.com/microsites/coc/ocbc/Documents/CNT-00...
- lostlogin 3y ago
  I’m with you and want more fibre, but people are brutal on hardware. I’ve been involved in the replacement of two fibre optic cables at work, used for pulse oximetry in an MR scanner. It was very expensive, twice. People force a bend and destroy them. It doesn’t matter what you tell people, they break them.
  - zamadatix 3y ago
    Was in healthcare IT as well: https://www.fs.com/products/41028.html?attribute=35025&id=615202 https://www.fs.com/products/41028.html?attribute=35025&id=61... for a couple of dollars you can get 2 paths of crush protected bend insensitive high speed fiber that barely degrades signal quality when you knot it up. To get around the limitations of the LC connector and wall jacks being regularly obliterated by equipment/tables being moved around use recessed jacks, that way they just pass by instead of break the connector (applies to rj45 as well). We had great success with this approach for a couple thousand locations. Of course, the real problem 95% of the time is really around the device not the technology the device uses. There is a misalignment of incentives on who can work on the device, whether standard parts are used, and whether the approved parts are the $2 type solution that will cost $800 in on site contractor fees to replace again or the $4 solution which actually stands a chance to being used. Once the device is bought nobody is going to be incented or allowed to do anything but fix it to status quo. It's one reason I had to get out of healthcare IT - it was more often the system getting in the way of what patients and nurses needed to do than the actual technology itself so solving things from a technology perspective felt like running on a treadmill and going nowhere.
vinay_ys 3y ago
We have FTTH everywhere in India and seeing how fiber is installed in all kinds of nooks and crannies, I can tell you that fiber is more resilient than you think. And frankly, I have experienced far less Internet outages with FTTH than I used to with twisted copper pairs (ADSL2+).
- dagmx 3y ago
  How thick are those cables versus standard consumer cables?
  - InvaderFizz 3y ago
    Most GPON is quite thin. Thinner and tougher than standard fiber patch cables.
  - pzmarzly 3y ago
    I don't know if this is a helpful comparison for you, but my FTTH cable is almost identical size and material-wise to Apple EarPods cable. Has been working fine for years now, though obviously I don't move the router that much.
  - vinay_ys 3y ago
    G.657B standard cables have a pulling (stress) bend radius of 5mm. So, you can abuse it quite a bit and it's fine. Also, while it is abused during installation, at rest, it is not under so much stress and usually have a sturdy casing to make sure it stays above its min bend radius.
chrischen 3y ago
The Meta Quest link cable is optical and way more than 1m long.
solarkraft 3y ago
Fiber cables are often more flexible than copper ones by virtue of just being a lot thinner.
- lxgr 3y ago
  Which exacerbates the problem of users easily exceeding the minimum allowable bending radius.

jauntywundrkind 3y ago

USB is still (as far as I know) a mess and that sucks. But DisplayPort has great optical cables available! I was early in & they were very cheap then (no one trusted them yet), 50m v1.4 for $60. Turns out to be vastly longer than I needed, & got a 20m cable for gaming from the roof. There's even DP 2.1 cables now. A USB4 with optical transport would be divine.

lxgr 3y ago
There are optical USB-C cables available! The standard explicitly supports that use case.
sagz 3y ago
Meta/Oculus makes a 5m optical USBC cable https://www.meta.com/quest/accessories/link-cable/ https://www.meta.com/quest/accessories/link-cable/ USB 3.2 Gen 1 though, not USB 4
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

Aurornis 3y ago

> It's so pleasant to deal with fiber. Consumers are absolutely brutal to cables. Minimum bend radius of copper cables get violated all the time, but copper has a decent chance of continuing to work if bent back. Not so with fiber. Fiber would only work with some heavy armor. Consumer fiber was actually tried in the past: Optical TOSLINK was briefly popular in the audio world. It was cheap relative to what you’d need for modern high speed fiber, but even that was too much to win out over copper. It faded away. Even within professionally maintained data centers, direct attach copper is often preferred over fiber interconnects when it’s possible to get away with it. Fiber is great when called for, but copper wins in practicality when you can get away with it. It’s been proven over and over again across industries. > Meanwhile, Apple wants $70 a pop for a single, 1m Thunderbolt 4 cable, and that's only been increasing. You picked the absolute most expensive cable as your benchmark. Look anywhere else and prices are lower and decreasing. Also, you are wrong about Apple cable prices increasing. They’ve actually dropped the price of their longer cables. But again, look to the overall market and you’ll see prices going down.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>Consumer fiber was actually tried in the past: [...] It faded away. Not everywhere. It's still not as popular as copper but it's not extinct.
ender341341 3y ago
to be fair TOSLINK was a particularly bad standard and offers lower audio quality to similar or cheaper analogue devices. It's whole selling point was basically "it's fiber optic so that makes it better" while not actually being better.
- yummypaint 3y ago
  It's literally the exact same digital signal sent over copper S/PDIF. The only meaningful advantage it offers is electrical isolation.
  - xnzakg 3y ago

Someone 3y ago

Would high speed optical work for connections that require regular unplugging? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOSLINK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOSLINK and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADAT_Lightpipe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADAT_Lightpipe are limited to about a megabyte/second, if I’m doing my math right. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MADI#Sampling_frequency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MADI#Sampling_frequency gets higher, at around 12 megabytes/second. That still is at least a factor of 100 away from this cable. I think that’s because it isn’t easy to make a plug that works reliably for a gigabytes per second fiber cable.

lwkl 3y ago
You would need a new connector because dust can break the signal and a cable that needs a dust cap sounds like a horrible consumer product.
- mensetmanusman 3y ago
  3M is on the bleeding edge here: https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/data-center-us/applications/interconnect-optical/ https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/data-center-us/applications/inte... used in ai data centers, probably years away from consumer adoption...

gatkinso 3y ago

This is my dream. To those worried about bending, I would be really curious to try one of these with levels of sheathing to see how they hold up in reality.

spicyjpeg 3y ago

Alec from Technology Connections covered the topic of consumer optical standards - or rather, the lack thereof - in a video that's now 4 years old: https://youtube.com/watch?v=CwZdur1Pi3M https://youtube.com/watch?v=CwZdur1Pi3M It mostly boils down to the reason others already mentioned: fragility, cost (optical transceivers have only recently become cheap enough to enable the use case of optical cables that behave like copper ones) and the requirement for copper wires anyway in order to carry power in addition to data.

kalleboo 3y ago

Everyone else is talking about bend radius but as someone who has abused fiber (just your standard cheap 10Gtek patch cables from Amazon) that's not the problem, modern fiber is quite bend-resistant. The problem is the ends. Inside each fiber plug is an exposed fiber. Dust is a huge problem if you expect users to toss the cables in their bag, and worse is damage to the exposed ends of the fiber which can get chipped and then then in turn damage the exposed fiber in the device you're plugging into. It would be cool if instead of those active Corning cables you could just get an active Thunderbolt-to-SMF plug, and then bring your own cables. Then the expensive part (the conversion circuitry and optical transceiver) can be reused for different applications and you just replace the cheap fiber with whatever length you want (or use pre-existing fiber in your home and update the optical transceivers when a new standard comes out and not have to re-wire) edit: thinking about it more, it would have been a lot cooler if instead of thunderbolt we just got a better Ethernet. Then we could use any medium we wanted to.