That's not fiber, that's a cheap piece of flexible plastic that conducts low-powered LED light at a few megabits per second.
Toslink is a specific cable connector type and transmission system. It does not describe the type of fiber used. Furthermore, "optical fiber" is a generic term used to describe any fiber cable that achieves total internal reflection. It doesn't matter whether it's plastic or glass or fluorides. It's still called "optical fiber". If you specifically want to talk about glass (silica) optical fiber, then
say glass/silica optical fiber. Otherwise, you're just flat out wrong in your statement.
Toslink cable can be made of plastic or glass fiber. Toslink cable's transmission rate has nothing to do with the material used in the cable and everything to do with the transmitter and receiver's pulse rate. The distance it can transmit also has to do with the power of the transmitter. The reason newer products often can use longer cables is that they use more power than the standard requires. In fact, plastic optical fiber is typically used for any optical fiber application where runs are less than 100 meters. How long a cable do you think Light Peak is going to need for consumer gear? It's not going to anywhere NEAR 100 meters in most consumer applications. Thus, this cable cost thing is a total red herring IMO.
Here I thought "real fiber" was made of a whole grain.
The optics involved send and receive laser pulses on frequencies that are precise down to a few nanometers, at one to tens of gigabits per second.
Copper will always be cheaper dollar-wise than fiber because copper doesn't require the same kinds of precision electronics at both ends to send and receive high bandwidth optical signals.
You're talking about the transmitters and receivers now, not the actual cable required for a given application. Price is also a function of production size and competition and the manufacturing technology used. Penlight sized lasers are dirt cheap these days, for example whereas that was not always the case.
I thought the purpose was to bring fiber optic computing home.
No, the point is to make Intel money. They want a product that is better than the competition and if they play their cards right, they'll have it. All they need to do is build a system that is compatible with USB3, but at the same time can potentially go beyond it. If they don't make it compatible, they'll have a losing system on their hands because frankly, USB 3.0 got there first and is backwards compatible with USB 2.x and 1.x. NO ONE (well maybe Apple would since they seem to love to buck standards most of the time) wants another Firewire situation whereby it's used in specialized applications and almost nowhere else.
Really, I thought originally the talk about Apple wanting this system was for a future iOS/Mobile type device to easily connect two devices together and trade information much faster than Bluetooth would ever allow (i.e. 802.11N doesn't work for two receiving end devices to trade data without a parent WiFi network). In other words, some future iPad might want to move some data to a future iPod Touch and maybe these future models have 128GB drives in them. Unless you're in a shared network, your only option would be Bluetooth from one device to another. If they had LightPeak, you could connect a tiny optical cable between them and transfer data pretty much as fast as their drives could handle it. THAT makes sense to want a system to do that and optical is a good choice for tiny mobile devices using low power over small cable runs.
But at home, it makes less sense. Plastic optical is no better than copper for a <100m cable run in most cases and you cannot transmit power over optical-only (thus requiring a copper cable line anyway). And quite frankly, it would be simple to use micro-USB connectors on mobile devices and just use USB 3.0 for large file transfers. So unless Intel is making this fully USB 3.0 compatible, I think it's a losing venture for now. They would need to be significantly faster (more than 2x) than USB 3.0 *AND* have a use for those speeds. Currently, there aren't any hard drives that could make use of it and things like audio interfaces don't need those kinds of speeds, so where's the need currently for something like a 100x USB 3.0 rate on consumer devices? (shakes head)
Even if Light Peak had gotten there first, it would still lack the backwards compatibility advantage that USB 3 has (i.e. it simply replaces USB 2.x ports the same way USB 2 replaced USB 1 ports; they're needed regardless so it's a no-brainer replacement/upgrade route. (i.e. we had FW800 long before USB 3.0 and it's way faster and better all around but it NEVER got mainstream adoption because it wasn't even plug (without an adapter) compatible with FW400, let alone had the world-wide adoption of USB 1.x to simply replace existing connectors on newer hardware). And THAT is what rabid Light Peak fanatics keep forgetting. Beta was a higher resolution format than VHS, but it still lost because it had an edge in more important areas (i.e. time and licensing advantages).
But if Light Peak (Copper) used USB 3.0 connectors and was 100% USB 3.0 compatible THEN it could see serious adoption over time because you could use all USB devices with it plus get light-peak specific devices as they were needed for faster transfers.
