alt Hacker News> 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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> 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.
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.