How does my computer transmit so much data over USB?

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A few years ago, you would plug in your mouse, keyboard, speakers, monitor, etc. into separate ports on a computer. Now, I have a dock that all my peripherals connect to, and my laptop is just connected to that dock through a single USB-C cable. There’s never any noticeable lag, either. What improvements have been made so that this is now possible?

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5 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

USB stands for Universal Serial Bus where Serial refers to data bits being sent one after the other, “in series” if you will. USB has incorporated improvements for each new version of the standard that allow for more data to be transferred by increasing the speed of bits. These include having more wires (to send data in each wire simultaneously), twisting the wires together to form “twisted pairs” that reduce noise, a layer of thin metal foil around the cable that “shields” from outside noise further, careful management of the distance between the metal core of each pole in the cable for reduced crosstalk between cables and many more. The reduction of noise is the barrier to having higher speed, because distinguishing between signal and noise becomes exponentially more difficult with higher bit rate. The circuit on each end of the cable has also improved organically with the introduction of gradually enhanced bus implementations such as PCI Express and the capability of pepherials such as fast SSD disks.

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