The Future of the Mac: Networking
The next two years promise much faster short-range and medium-range wired and wireless networking, and zippier mobile connections.
What’s the point of these increasing speeds, when today’s networking gear already feels reasonably fast? Video, primarily. The name of the game is streaming or downloading high-definition video—across a room or from one end of the house to the other—while still leaving enough room on the network for other activities such as file downloads, Facebook, and email.
Connecting devices
Back when Thunderbolt technology was still under development, Intel (its main mover) said that optical cabling would enable multiple-gigabits-per-second connections to displays, peripherals, and networks, and would permit cords to run as far as 30 meters. Things didn’t quite pan out that way.
Apparently optical cabling was hard to produce and expensive, so Apple and Intel switched to copper wiring instead. That wiring still supported the Thunderbolt spec’s two channels of simultaneous bidirectional (“full duplex”) 10-gbps data. But it didn’t allow for those long cables; instead, connections could be no more than about 10 feet (3 meters). Using wire also necessitated the addition of chips to the cables, to handle signaling and to ensure backward compatibility with DisplayPort. The one upside: Thunderbolt cords can pass up to 10 watts per device, more than double USB 3.0’s capacity.
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