AppleInsider Staff
Making good on a promise to unveil new interconnect products at CES, Gorilla Glass producer Corning on Monday revealed optical Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 cables that can transfer data over hundreds of feet.
Corning's new "Thunderbolt Optical Cables" and "USB 3.Optical Cables" both use the company's ClearCurve VSDN optical fiber technology to significantly extend the range of data transmission over traditional copper-based products. According to Corning, the new cables are also stronger than copper cables despite being 50 percent smaller and 80 percent lighter.
Corning teased the Thunderbolt version of its aptly-named "Optical Cable" in an announcement last week regarding the company's upcoming Gorilla Glass 3.
While data speeds won't be boosted by the optical fiber tech, enterprise or professional users may be interested in the products' support of ultra-long cable runs. Corning says the USB 3.Optical Cables max out at 100 feet (30 meters), while the Thunderbolt Optical Cables can reach lengths up to 330 feet (100 meters) without daisy chaining devices.
“Users can create, move and manage their data in a much more flexible, efficient and durable manner with this new technology," said Mike Bell, senior vice president and general manager of Corning's Optical Connectivity Solutions. "Video can be live edited from across a football field; a music library can be downloaded 40% faster; and devices can be quickly accessed and connected with this much smaller and lighter cable when the capabilities of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth just aren’t enough.â€
Both products feature an "ultra-slim, zero-bend" radius cable with a noise-reducing design. The Thunderbolt version allows for full bi-directional 10Gbps data rates, while the USB 3.0 iteration provides 5Gbps and is backward-compatible with USB 2.0.
Corning expects the Optical Cables to go on sale sometime in the first quarter but gave no word on pricing.
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18 Comments
This seems like it might be a very unique case for notebook and AIO users that can't get an optical card in their system. Or maybe some company that has monitors placed too far away from their system for some presentation use.
Coming soon for the low, low, price of $1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
Time for Apple to release a Thunderbolt to 10 Gig Ethernet adaptor.
I have to say, I can't wait. It'll have to drop a price but I can definitely see Thunderbolt replace my current Firewire setup. I have Firewire backup drives in a safe against theft and (small) disasters. The challenge at the moment is that you can't safely use Firewire over more than 5 meters. A 100 meter solution would even allow me store my backups at the neighbours.
This takes me back. In 1980 my Apple retail business was a reseller for Symbiotic Systems in the UK and installed hard drives with fibre optic cables that could run very long lengths, with repeaters when required, to network everything together. This was on Apple ][ computers and massive 10 and 20 MB hard drives! LOL