Hacker News Reader

Comment by _0w8t | Hacker News Reader

I have never heard about confusion with Ethernet cables. Everybody understood that to get gigabit speed one needs more expensive Cat6 cables with no suggestions to have a different connector. Why USB-C should be different?

View on HN

Gigabit Ethernet does not require Cat6. Cat5 is capable but Cat5e is recommended. Cat6 and Cat7 can be used but are overkill.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabit_Ethernet#1000BASE-T

https://www.tomsguide.com/us/gigabit-ethernet-needtoknow,rev...

The difference is that if you use Cat5, it still works, just slower. With USB-C, some features just won't work.

That's not necessary true. Ethernet speed negotiation runs at 1mbps, and is based on announcing capabilities. If both sides are capable of GigE and connected with cat3, they can negotiate to GigE and fail to work. There's nothing in the standard that provides for negotiating a slower speed in this case (but some nics or drivers may figure it out)

But again, like USB1/2/3, Cat5/6 is one additional parameter, not a matrix. You look for a single number and you're done. That's much more complex for USB-C, in a context where the industry is often (maybe even willfully) opaque on reporting correct specification. I hope they will come up with a simple way to signal all these combinations (maybe a standard color-coded label like you have for calories/salt/etc contents in many European supermarkets) but at the moment it's definitely an issue.

You're acting as if cables are picking an choosing tiny subsets of the spec. Reality is most cheap cables support almost nothing, and just about every expensive cable I've seen supports all of the spec currently established. It's not like someone is going to choose to support thunderbolt and then not support usb3.

And there's also Power over Ethernet, which comes in multiple standards and several mutually-incompatible non-standard variants. And non-Ethernet systems that use the same 8p8c connector. It's still a matrix.

I’d argue that people who even know about PoE are a small number whose job depends on them understanding such intricacies (and even them can get it wrong, as proven by this very thread). USB is mass-market consumer technology and has to be simpler than that if it wants to succeed. The best we can hope for, as I mentioned in another post, is something similar to washing labels.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com