Quote Originally Posted by Serra View Post
I'm not sure I fully "get" Light Peak. I see on Wiki that it says the speeds will start at 10Gb/s - is that actually true? If so, what will the costs be like? Current 10Gb/s infrastructure is hideously expensive... far, far out of what any consumer could possibly afford. If the speeds are lower though, then I guess I'm just not sure why we need yet another standard and another cable... one which quite likely has a lower lifetime (lasers aren't known for longevity, and I don't think LED's could get up to 10Gb/s without using a large field of them, though I could be wrong on that).

Don't get me wrong, if prices are actually low enough for this to be useful and it does start at 10Gb/s then I'm on board.


Edit: Waaaaait a second. I see they're also trying to push for LAN to be done through lightpeak? Okay, now I know they're pushing for too much. Speeds right now aren't held down by the cabling standards, they're held down by processing power at the router/switch node. We have cabling right now that can do 10Gb/s but we're on 1Gb/s because only highly expensive equipment can handle the throughput (let alone the signaling). This is a very serious chink in the "It's a 10Gb/s cable that will do it all!" theory and until I learn more about this implementation I'm a little scared of what will happen if it does get aggressively pushed out.

I'm afraid that you don't really understand what the purpose of this is. It's, put simply, more of a dock port for laptops than anything else. It's meant to connect a laptop to all external devices inclouding routers and internet connections in general. I don't see anything wrong with that...