According to the USB standard, a cable should not be more than five feet long. That is, unless you are using Icron's ThinkLogical setup, ExtremeUSB. The bridging technology will allow you to use a cable which is 25 miles long.
Imagine the convenience! You could sit at home with a keyboard in your lap but your your computer could be one town over in the office, connected via CAT5, fiber or even the powerlines. Working from home is finally a possibility.
Of course, that would be quite foolish, but one of the selling points of the system is that governments can use it to run secure connections to distant cameras. For us, more modest extensions over USB's five-foot limit mean we can tuck unsightly peripherals away in hidden corners.
As you may have guessed, the ThinkLogical setup doesn't use real USB. You buy some boxes and plug them in. Each box converts the USB signal to or from a proprietary signal and sends this over the wire (or the air, or the powerline). The trick is that, to the computer and other devices, the whole thing looks like a regular USB hub. A twenty five mile long USB hub, but a hub nonetheless.
We don't have a price -- although this would be dead useful at home, the pitch is aimed squarely at the business market and you'll need to talk contracts. There is however, "ExtremeUSB On a Chip" arriving at OEMs in the first part of 2009, which means that this tech could find its way inside everyday gadgets. Wireless USB camera tethering, anyone?
Product page [Icron. Thanks, Michael!]
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