As a young impressionable systems engineer during my first job abroad, I was handed a bright, purple backpack probably as a ritual of embarrassment to the newbie. Over the course of weeks, I soon grew rather attached to the bag, which I affectionately called Big Purple.

Inside its cavernous compartments, you’ll find a very nice pair of network cable crimping tool, a screwdriver set, some proprietary tools (for those weird server racks), cable tester, spare fibre-optic cables, a cheap flashlight, a few old sticks of chewing gum, some wires, zip ties, leftover screws – which comes really handy at times, a wire cutter and stripper, epoxy glue, and of course, the indispensable duct tape.

Of all the things inside the Big Purple, the fibre-optic cables are by far the lightest and most expensive of the lot. It’s about a foot-long wrapped inside a simple plastic packaging and cost roughly about RM100 or so I’ve been told. The best part is these fibre-optic cables never seem to break or get lost and I always wondered why bother carrying spares?

Now that brings us to today’s topic on the upcoming universal serial bus (USB) 3.0 standards which uses, or should I say, “leverages” on enterprise server technology. You see, the setup is ingenious; a USB 3.0 cable will have the traditional four-pin copper interconnects with a grounded cable with a pair of fibre optic which interconnects on the “redundant” part of the plastic USB connector for backwards compatibility.

Assumingly, the copper pins will still provide interconnects or at the very least, the five volts power when the fibre interconnects are in use, and since it’s such a big leap forward, no one, not even Intel’s top brass at the recent Intel Developer Forum in Taipei, would speak in details about it. And apart from teething problems as well as the cost factor (which should come down once everyone and their cat has a USB 3.0 device), the new hybrid connectivity is ingenious.

It delivers both power through the two copper pins and slower USB 2.0’s 480Mbps (megabits per second) and even slower legacy USB 1.0’s 12Mbps data on the other two, and uses fibre optics for the really high-speed stuff, at roughly 10 times the current bandwidth at 4.8 gigabits per second. All this speed with full backwards-compatibility. Now let’s just sit back and wait for our data to go flying at the speed of light in the very near future.