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Comment by qurren | Hacker News Reader

> 40gbps is an insane data rate that requires shielding, precision, and testing. There is no way you are getting that for $2.

I dunno, Cat8 is 40gbps and pretty cheap. DOCSIS 4.0 does 10Gbps on some really ancient cables. I'm sure Cat9 will do even better, at least the cat people and the doc people are trying harder than the USB people.

Unifi even has a PoE-over-coax solution. Add some Anker GaN shit and I'm sure it can be miniaturized.

> outside of connecting a laptop to your monitor

As soon as I need a "special" cable to connect a laptop to a monitor, we're effectively back to the 1990s-2000s when I needed a special monitor cable. There is no point to connector standardization if any cable can't do any function.

The whole point of this thread was "one type of cable for everything" and "grab any USB-C cable from your personal stash and they all work for every use case".

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99% of user use cases for USB are charging batteries and copying a word document on a flash drive. For those cases literally every port and cable works. For video, in every office and home, the thunderbolt cable just sits in the monitor at all times with just the USB end free. Meaning there is no confusion around which cable is the video one because the video one only ever sits connected to the monitor.

While I now no longer have to carry around a bag of chargers when I travel or fish through a bucket of black DC adapters for the right one.

There's tons of confusion when I have new usb-c devices like a portable usb-c monitor or a VR headset or some other gadget. I have cables that seem beefy because they do power, but they don't do data, and I end up having to go through a pile of USB-c cables to find one that does data. It's frustrating!

> Cat8 is 40gbps and pretty cheap

Is it really though? People are selling cables, but 40Gbase-T hardware does not exist, and 10Gbase-T hardware is already crazy power hungry and the SFP+s heat up much you burn yourself if you touch them. Meanwhile USB-C 10 Gbps works on an iPhone.

Meanwhile, Coax is huge and stiff. Good high-speed USB-C cables actually have mini coax inside.

You can trade-off cable shielding for electronics power and corresponding heat to encode/decode stuff.

Ethernet is notoriously power hungry, but I bet you can use a phone cable and still get tens of Gb over a very short range.

> There is no point to connector standardization if any cable can't do any function.

I completely disagree.

When the only difference between cables is max speed, that's still a huge improvement over a nest of different cable types, half of which are custom. And it's easy to get into a position where all your USB-C cables differ only by max speed.

Which is worse because they all look sort of the same, but they are not the same.

It's even worse for non-techies, who don't understand what a gbps or a watt is, and who will leave a 1-star review, or worse, trash their cable, because their cable was "slow" but was meant for 240W PD but only supported USB 2.0. They purchased it initially because it had 5 stars.

Ideally, there should only be "5 star" USB cables, and they should all work for all purposes that they can physically plug into.

The situation in the early 2000s is I could spot the cable I needed from a mile away.

Just about every data cable standard has different speed capabilities on a per-cable basis. Ethernet, HDMI, and displayport have the same issue and usually with even worse labeling.

> Ideally, there should only be "5 star" USB cables, and they should all work for all purposes that they can physically plug into.

That requires they never increase the speed again. Seems like a bad starting point.

And most people will accept the tradeoff of different cable speeds when it means long charging cables can be 10x cheaper. The problem is when manufacturers choose to use bad labels.

And if you push people off USB they're going to use 27 different kinds of cable and you won't be able to spot which generic black wire you need from across the room.

Also, if we pretend they set the max speed in stone in 2013, it's easy to get yourself a full set of 240W 10Gbps-per-lane do-everything cables in every length from 0 to 2.5 meters. $25 isn't an amazing price but sticking with passive cables keeps you out of the real nasty prices.

USB 2.0 cables can be thinner, more flexible, longer, and cheaper. You could decide to only ever use thunderbolt cables for everything, but you'd be paying $40-$100 for a cable as thick as a mains power cord and doesn't offer any benefit at all to charging your phone.

We need better labeling rather than making every single USB cable a 40gbit thunderbolt cable.

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