Plastic fiber as a use case for Intel’s Light Peak

For those who haven’t seen any keynote from Intel’s IDF for the last couple of years, Light Peak is the code name for a revolutionary technology that will allow cheap interconnects at 10Gbps, for domestic usage, based on optical technology.

Here’s a quick into on Light Peak:

Now, there’s a number of obvious limitations on using glass optical fiber. To start with, it’s brittle. No one is considering a consumer cable that cannot be bent! Nor can it have a maximum number of usages, nor having to be polished at each end. There’s simply no way glass optical fiber will make it’s way into a living room.

Intel promises 10Gbps next year at 30m, so it we take into account GI-POF (like this) which allows for 300Mhz/Km of bandwidth, one can assume that 10Gbps is also attainable, at least for distances of 20m+.

Let’s see what happens near the year’s end, when more info will come out from Intel.

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