“It’s really rather hard to see how the person on the Clapham omnibus is going to work out what’s happening”

Jon is the MD of an IT consultancy that specialises in testing and deploying kit

@jonhoneyball

Getting old means finding things more confusing, but I can’t be the only person who is completely bewildered by USB. It started off simply enough. We had USB. There were a few plug choices, but we knew what it did. Then along came USB 2.o and that was reasonably straightforward too. It was only with the arrival of USB 3.0 that it seems to have gone barking mad.

USB 3.0 was released in 2007. One of its main features was a speed increase from the USB 2.o spec of 480Mbits/sec to a much-improved 5Gbits/sec connection speed. This was necessary for a broader range of devices to be connected. For example, a modern hard disk isn’t much fun limited to 480Mbits/sec and let’s not even consider connecting a monitor down this generation of narrow pipe.

So far, so obvious. But in 2015, the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), the organisation responsible for the USB spec and the naming conventions used to describe products, appears to have lost the plot.

At this point, it released a new 10Gbits/sec version of USB 3.0, which needed its own name. In an attempt to confuse everyone, the USB-IF decided to rename USB 3.0 as “SuperSpeed USB” and the 10Gbits/sec version as “SuperSpeed USB+”. Unsurprisingly, manufacturers didn’t go along with this idea. So USB-IF had another go. It decided to call them USB 3.1 Gen 1 and USB 3.1 Gen 2.

I hope you’re keeping up at the back. Your USB 3.0 connection was