Can a Thunderbolt optical cable be extended?

[Dravestus]

Hi.

I tried searching the web and came up with nothing. So I am turning to the LTT community for help.

Has anyone here tried or can explain if it is even possible to take a Thunderbolt Optical cable and extend it with a standard optical cable?
I was thinking of moving my PC to the basement with the rest of the server and network hardware and just run a thunderbolt cable from there but I would need to get the longest one (60 meters), like this but the price seems quite prohibitive to me.
Yet if I look for generic fiberoptic cable i can see that 60$ would get me 60 meters worth. I don't think that this certain example has a high enough capacity but from Alibaba I can apparently get a full kilometer of 24 core fiberoptic cable for less than half of what the Corning Thunderbolt cable costs.
Hence my hope that I can buy the cheapest Corning Thunderbolt cable, some regular fibreoptic cable and use it to extend the Thunderbolt cable.

Can this be done?  Has anyone done this? Any feedback is much appreciated.

[m0k]

Sorry i cant give a concrete answer, at work atm
In this video Linus uses a optical cable to connect his pc to a docking station @ 10:48 ish

 

 

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

10 minutes ago, Dravestus said:

Hi.

I tried searching the web and came up with nothing. So I am turning to the LTT community for help.

Has anyone here tried or can explain if it is even possible to take a Thunderbolt Optical cable and extend it with a standard optical cable?
I was thinking of moving my PC to the basement with the rest of the server and network hardware and just run a thunderbolt cable from there but I would need to get the longest one (60 meters), like this but the price seems quite prohibitive to me.
Yet if I look for generic fiberoptic cable i can see that 60$ would get me 60 meters worth. I don't think that this certain example has a high enough capacity but from Alibaba I can apparently get a full kilometer of 24 core fiberoptic cable for less than half of what the Corning Thunderbolt cable costs.
Hence my hope that I can buy the cheapest Corning Thunderbolt cable, some regular fibreoptic cable and use it to extend the Thunderbolt cable.

Can this be done?  Has anyone done this? Any feedback is much appreciated.

Probably not. You would have to cut the cable first to find out what type of cable.

 

Also you don't know how many strands there are, and if its single or multi node.

 

Just run fiber ethernet if you want long range fiber.

[Dravestus]

11 minutes ago, mok said:

Sorry i cant give a concrete answer, at work atm
In this video Linus uses a optical cable to connect his pc to a docking station @ 10:48 ish

 

 

 

Yep, that is where I got the initial idea from. Just the distances are a bit larger for me.

[dany_boy]

According to this (very simplistic but useful) diagram, the optical solutions offered by corning use multiple fibres directly attached to the circuitry, so not really an option to be extended. The fibre spool you point to, still would need proper terminations and of course the bidirectional drivers at both ends. It seems you are in a really bad spot my friend.

Cheers

[Dravestus]

24 minutes ago, dany_boy said:

According to this (very simplistic but useful) diagram, the optical solutions offered by corning use multiple fibres directly attached to the circuitry, so not really an option to be extended. The fibre spool you point to, still would need proper terminations and of course the bidirectional drivers at both ends. It seems you are in a really bad spot my friend.

Cheers

Thaks for the diagram :)

 

Seeing as I lack the equipment and skills to do optical fibre welding this idea is dead in water anyway.
Guess I will just run multiple Ethernet lines and do USB and HDMI over them.