If I understand correctly, the job of the data cable is to transfer current from a wall charger or computer to a phone. Through this current the phone decipers the zero and 1s to make it code/data. Now shouldn’t current flow at the same rate between two cables, provided the thickness/resistance is the same?
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The thing is that lightning cable still uses usb2.0 specs, which is based on 2 conductors for data and 2 for power.
Typec is a much further and may support wide variety of versions from 1.0 up to 3.1 and utilities much more data conductors in the cable.
It’s generally more about the protocol than the physical cable the determines the bandwidth. When you get to really high bandwidths you do need a better cable so the signals are cleaner and the differences between one bit and the next bit is clear.
The USB connector has 4 pairs (8 pins) dedicated for superspeed USB modes or alternate purposes such as video, in addition to the 2 pins used for a single usb2 pair. (although gen2x1 and 1×1 modes only use 2 pairs of the superspeed pins for 10/5gbps)
The lightning connector just has a single usb2 pair
There are multiple wires. There are data wires, and power wires.
The power wires deal with the charging, while the data wires handle data transfers. The jobs are not mixed between them.
The data wires carry a quite low amount of current, but they turn on and off very quickly. This switching of on and off is the data transfer. And in the case of usb-c, it happens much more quickly than lightning. Lightning is a standard that was made for significantly older hardware, so it tends to be slower.
Er… no. That’s just misunderstanding of how data is transferred on signal lines, forget about this current idea, got nothing to do with data rates.
Really, data rates have more to do with date of standard spec than anything else. The limiting factors are devices on either end which have to be compliant to standard and handle all this data. As USB comms standards are newer they are specced to capabilities of newer devices, that’s all there is to really.
Data communication is entirely unrelated to how much current you pull through the wires.
To answer your question, though, probably one of the most important factor is that USB C simply has more communication wires to work with than Lightning does.
Imagine you’ve got an office building with two phones. Now imagine there’s another office building with three phones. The office with three phones is going to be able to handle more calls and communicate more overall information than the office with only two. They’ve got a whole extra phone they can use.
It gets more complicated, but that’s a major difference between the two protocols.
Electricity can still be rather fickle. Lets look at ethernet cables. For newer standards, to reach extreme bandwidths, they had to remove the colored stripes on the individual conductors because the dye would cause interference. Thats on top of very specific twist rates of each conductor pair. They all still use the RJ45 connector on both ends, but how the cable itself is designed and manufactured has had a significant impact on what it can carry.
It has nothing to do with the cable and everything to do with the plug. If you had some laboratory-grade signal generator you could hook up either cable and clock a gazillion hertz across them. It has little to do with the number of wires either.
Data in a computer is represented as high volts and low volts. I believe in computers a 1 is usually anything above 5 volts and a 0 is anything below 2 volts. How quickly I can change between a one and a zero determines how quickly I can transfer data. The measure of how quickly I can change data is measured in frequency, and you’ll hear it referred to as the clock speed.
The way it works is data is loaded into a register, then when the clock cycles that data is transmitted across the line.
USB is faster because it has a faster controller, which you can think of as a CPU for the USB.
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