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?
​
Thank You!
In: 1
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.
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.
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
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.
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.