OWC
How long can a USB-C cable be?
Passive copper cables suffer from signal attenuation and integrity loss over distance. The USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) has guidelines on USB cable length based on the transfer rate. 5Gbps cables should be at most 6.6 feet (2 meters), while 10Gbps cables can reach up to 3.3 feet (1 meter). This is why the cable you get with your iPhone is 1-meter long,
Though not widely used for data transfer, USB 2.0 cables stretch up to 13.2 feet (4 meters) due to their slow transfer rate of 480Mbps—that’s 83.33 times slower than a 40Gbps connection. If you were transferring a large 50GB file (like a 4K movie), at 40Gbps, the transfer would finish in about 10 seconds. At 480Mbps, the same file would take around 15 minutes to finish.
Passive USB4 and Thunderbolt 3 cables have a maximum length of 3.3 feet (1m), while Thunderbolt 4 maxes out at 6.6 feet (2m). While passive Thunderbolt 5 cables can reach 3 meters, in order to maintain 80Gbps full speed the cable should be maximum 1 meter. Longer setups require active USB4 or Thunderbolt cables that use built-in electronics to reach over 2 meters.
The longest 40Gbps cable we’ve seen, from Corning, is actually 82 feet (25 meters), costs over $400, and doesn’t support charging at all. At $130, OWC’s new 16-foot USB4 cables are more reasonably priced and carry up to 240W of power.
OWC
The physics normally gets in the way. High-speed data doesn’t enjoy travelling long distances through copper. The longer the cable, the harder it becomes to maintain signal integrity at very high frequencies. That’s why passive USB4 and Thunderbolt cables capable of maximum speeds are measured in meters rather than rooms.
OWC’s solution is to replace the traditional copper highway with active multi-mode optical fiber technology. The cable uses light to carry the high-speed data, with active electronics helping maintain the signal over the longer run. It is built for bandwidth intensive applications that require stable, consistent signal transmission and power delivery free from EMI and RFI interference.
