Intel and Apple coming out with LightPeak today!

[MetalJunkie]

There is no way in 5 years if this technology is just coming out now for hard wire it's a long way off for wireless.

You'd be surprised.

[tjanuranus]

I've transfered files to a HD via wireless, i stopped because using firewire 800 was much faster. Thunderbolt makes a JOkE out of firewire 800.

[TL]

There is no way in 5 years if this technology is just coming out now for hard wire it's a long way off for wireless.

In the tech world, 5 years is a long way off.

[emindead]

There is no way in 5 years if this technology is just coming out now for hard wire it's a long way off for wireless.

In the tech world, 5 years is a long way off.

Exactly. Look at what Kurzweil says about the advance of technology. Not even in five years you will want today's best phone in the market.

[tjanuranus]

I know what you are saying but the wireless technology has hardly progressed at all in years, meanwhile the hard wire is progressive very fast.

[kári]

Yes, and once the wireless technology catches up with that trend, for which I believe 5 years a decent timeframe, people won't care about cables anymore. I wouldn't care if a cable offered a 10 TB/s transfer rate when I can just sync wirelessly at, say, 1 GB/s.

[XJDenton]

Looking at the current trends it seems probable that wireless is still only going to be about 300 Mb/S in 5 years assuming a similar advancement rate to the last decade or so. Still, I maintain the max bandwidth is largely irrelevant to consumers, as their ipods and ipads won't be writing anywhere close to to maxing out those speeds.

[YtseBitsySpider]

Looking at the current trends it seems probable that wireless is still only going to be about 300 Mb/S in 5 years assuming a similar advancement rate to the last decade or so. Still, I maintain the max bandwidth is largely irrelevant to consumers, as their ipods and ipads won't be writing anywhere close to to maxing out those speeds.

To the CLOUD!!

Internal bandwidth is irrelevant, but Netflix is going a long to proving my theory of the internet dying do to bandwidth issues.

[kári]

The internet won't die. Services might.

[XJDenton]

Theres some funky stuff going on with nonlinear fibreoptics that has the potential to solve the bandwidth issues. Else people will just have to get used to the idea of bandwidth being a limited resource.

[kári]

The average internet user of my age can cut their bandwidth usage in half by streaming the actual music file instead of a whole youtube video to listen to a song.

[orcus116]

People do that?

[kári]

Everyone does it here. "Check out this song! *youtube link*". And a fair amount of people I know just have youtube playing videos (music) in some tab when on the computer.

[tjanuranus]

I'm not talking about syncing ipods. Obviously the way for that is wireless as it is in iOS. I'm talking about professional applications that need high speed and consistent transfer.

[kári]

I'm not talking about syncing ipods. Obviously the way for that is wireless as it is in iOS. I'm talking about professional applications that need high speed and consistent transfer.

Sure, wires are the way to go then. But for the other 99% of the market, wireless is where it's at.

[tjanuranus]

Well that's what were talking about! for times when you need a fast connection.

[cramx3]

The technology sounds great, but I won't be excited about this for awhile. It will take a long time for this to become a universal connector and not because of it's abilities, but because of price. I am a subscriber to Maximum PC magazine and they had an article last month about this. While I recently tossed the mag, I can't go back and reread, I believe it said that the cost per connector was extremely high and that not all motherboard manufacturers plan on using it yet.  It's nice that intel is involved (and they put millions into research and development of lots of products that fail so that means nothing) I agree that since Apple is involved some companies may be skeptical on using their product.  Also to make it useful for business purposes, entire networking infrastructures will need to be redone and landlines created to use these cables and that won't happen anytime soon since fiberoptic cables haven't replaced most of the copper infrastructure of the USA (hence the possible bandwidth issues referenced in this thread.)

[rumborak]

There's an interesting comment on the Wikipedia page that given that Thunderbolt is an extension of PCI, devices connected to it will have direct access to the whole RAM, which could be an issue.

rumborak