One of the big problems with modern computing is the amount of copper cabling required to connect all of the devices together. To make things worse many of these cables are of different types with different connectors depending on the device you have. To the uninitiated this morass of cabling can be quite intimidating. I suppose it used to be worse because USB has all but replaced parallel and serial cables of yesteryear and is much easier to use.

An average PC today would have a video cable, a network cable, keyboard and mouse cables, at least two USB cables and a power cord making, if all are just 1metre in length, 7 metres of cabling hiding behind the equipment.

Of course that is just basic, if, like me, you have more than two peripheral devices such as a printer, a camera, a PDA, 5.1 or 7.1  Speaker systems, headphones, UPS, mobile phone, scanner, webcam and camcorder (to name but a few) then you are likely to have considerable more than 7 metres of cabling winding their way between all of the devices. I guess at the moment I would have roughly 20 metres of cabling lurking in the further recesses of my desk just associated with my main desktop computer alone.

Many of these cables, being made of copper, are bulky and the industry has tried to reduce cabling through the use of wireless technologies like bluetooth attached mobile phones or, for that matter, keyboards and mice. Cable standardisation also has been tried like, as mentioned, with the introduction of  USB. Failing all of that many firms provide products that try to hide the cables through various cable management schemes.

Intel are trying the cable standardisation route again with "Light Peak" but they want all devices that connect to a PC to use the new cabling system and as the name suggests none of the cabling is copper based but use fibre-optic technology to pass data instead.

Fibre cables are much thinner than copper and can carry much more data so video cables would be a breeze to make. As fibre connectors are much smaller than copper ones the space they would take on the computer itself or for any small devices would also be much reduced so this is not a bad idea.

Intel are currently trying to make "Light Peak" an industry standard so even if they succeed wide-spread deployment would still be years away. However, Intel make chipsets used in the majority of PC's sold so they have enormous influence on the PC industry and reports are that Sony are also taking an active interest.