The picture above tells its own story. This was the Corning Glass stand at CeBIT. Rather small, I thought for such a big name in computing, and only really focusing on its optical cable business, but that was intriguing enough.

I like the idea of an optical, 30-metre USB 3 or Thunderbolt cable, with transceivers small and low-power enough to fit into an only fractionally larger USB 3 plug at either end. But when I started thinking through the implications of what Corning was proposing, I hit a rock.

The last time I put in an optical fibre by myself (by buying a very long patch lead, admittedly) it bordered on the farcical, because any damage to that lead and the whole idea was toast. A lot can happen to a humble cable over a 100ft run, from mice to vacuum cleaners to incautious furniture movements, and I was used to the old assessment of optical fibre of any kind: it’s fragile. Certainly more fragile than the equivalent copper.

The more grizzled and senior Corning man reacted with positive pleasure. “Show him the block,” he muttered, like something out of a cameo in Pulp Fiction. “Show him the BLOCK”.

What you can see in the picture is indeed “the block”: four blind-ended holes, drilled partway in and just the size to uncomfortably squeeze a doubled-over fibre cable. You can see the stumpy end of the fibre, pulled out at the right side; it’s folded over at what they call “zero radius”. That means this is more durable than the copper cable it replaces. If I understood what Corning was showing correctly, then the block’s fibres, bent double like little pretzels, were passing the traffic between a MacBook Pro laptop and an array of Thunderbolt drives. Not only one, but an array.

The USB3 fibre cables will be launched this spring in the USA, and a bit later in Europe. I assume the Thunderbolt stuff is going to be around the same time since the technology isn’t that different. I’m astonished by the way that Thunderbolt has been taken up by Apple and by a few laptop vendors, but not by the server and corporate world. Partly this is an absence of supporting hardware – I still haven’t heard of a two-thunderbolt port PCI-express card from a vendor I trust, for instance – but maybe once a key enabling piece of the puzzle like these smart glass cables are freely available, that will change.