Eh? Typical min bend radius is like 10x diameter in static conditions, so for a 2mm fiber cable that'd be 20mm or ~0.8". That's not an issue at all with consumer usage, and if you're really worried is trivially solved by just building the thing up to the level of thickness Thunderbolt cables have already. That's why Corning for example advertised their old TB optical cables as "zero bend radius" [0], adding more polymer/armor around a fiber cable so that someone can do whatever with it and it naturally won't go out of spec isn't a big deal.
FWIW, anecdotally high performance copper doesn't like abnormal use either. 10g USB-C cables are cheap enough that I tried taking one and using a vice grip to actually really squash thing at an angle, and it didn't like that at all in terms of working reliably afterwards. I doubt DP, HDMI and the like would do better, and those are plenty thick too. It never comes up though in normal use. And when cables are cheap vs stupid pricey making a mistake no longer is such a big deal. If you use an $8 cable a bit too hard and it stops working, well grab another one out of the drawer. If your $70 cable breaks that's a touch worse.
Was in healthcare IT as well: https://www.fs.com/products/41028.html?attribute=35025&id=61... for a couple of dollars you can get 2 paths of crush protected bend insensitive high speed fiber that barely degrades signal quality when you knot it up. To get around the limitations of the LC connector and wall jacks being regularly obliterated by equipment/tables being moved around use recessed jacks, that way they just pass by instead of break the connector (applies to rj45 as well). We had great success with this approach for a couple thousand locations.
Of course, the real problem 95% of the time is really around the device not the technology the device uses. There is a misalignment of incentives on who can work on the device, whether standard parts are used, and whether the approved parts are the $2 type solution that will cost $800 in on site contractor fees to replace again or the $4 solution which actually stands a chance to being used. Once the device is bought nobody is going to be incented or allowed to do anything but fix it to status quo. It's one reason I had to get out of healthcare IT - it was more often the system getting in the way of what patients and nurses needed to do than the actual technology itself so solving things from a technology perspective felt like running on a treadmill and going nowhere.
In my experience they wouldn't even mind or be embarrassed, so long as said solution sounded like it would stay out of the way and let them use the device more conveniently. To them that's the whole point of IT: make it less painful to use the devices how they want to use them to do their job. IT isn't the savior that designs things they want, it's the cost center that makes the things they have to use less annoying to use.
Until someone figures out how to supply bus power over optical fiber, I don't see it as a viable alternative for typical consumer peripheral I/O applications, no matter how inexpensive and robust the cables are.
The most common use cases for the kind of long range high bandwidth connectivity that fiber is good for are networking and displays, neither of which typically carry power in consumer use cases. USB cannot be replaced by a purely optical connection, but Ethernet and DisplayPort certainly can, and tunneling USB alongside DisplayPort to split back out at the monitor doesn't present any power delivery challenges.
We have FTTH everywhere in India and seeing how fiber is installed in all kinds of nooks and crannies, I can tell you that fiber is more resilient than you think. And frankly, I have experienced far less Internet outages with FTTH than I used to with twisted copper pairs (ADSL2+).
G.657B standard cables have a pulling (stress) bend radius of 5mm. So, you can abuse it quite a bit and it's fine. Also, while it is abused during installation, at rest, it is not under so much stress and usually have a sturdy casing to make sure it stays above its min bend radius.
I don't know if this is a helpful comparison for you, but my FTTH cable is almost identical size and material-wise to Apple EarPods cable. Has been working fine for years now, though obviously I don't move the router that much.
It bends just fine. There's tons of fiber cables for "ordinary users" including HDMI, DisplayPort, Thunderbolt, VR link cables, and, of course, toslink. You just end up with the extra cost and complexity of having transceivers built into the cable which is a waste especially at these speeds where copper is clearly a limitation.
- long runs that are not that long. hdmi does not like long cables at all. even an overhead projector in a classroom requires super expensive cables (ever wondered why it's still mostly vga?)
- packing multiple displays in a single cable. fiber is so thin that with trunk cables you get a lot of strands in a single cable, capable of running a lot of displays
- just getting a really thin cable that can be run in existing conduits or hard to reach places
I did buy such a cable for home for the third reason, to run from the PC in the office to the TV in the living room. It runs on a bog standard OM3 MPO cable. The specific one I got comes from HeyOptics and their website already showcases a few usecases [1]. (not affiliated, just a great product that just works)
As for stadiums and more generally broadcast video, they're using SDI instead of HDMI. Those are indeed most of the time fiber, both for range and weight (think of the cameraman running along the terrain during a sport event, and their long tail of cables). When they use HDMI it's more in the control room.
8m or so is the limit for HDMI passive cables being 100% reliable.
If you want to go 15-30m--- using a video source from another part of your house, or to drive a projector in the middle of a classroom--- and you buy an "active cable", odds are it's fiber optic inside.
If you want to go hundreds of meters away, you'll get a purpose-built box that uses your own optical cables instead of a cable that hides the optical transceivers inside.
It's fairly thin, quite a bit thinner than most of my traditional copper cables I think. Apparently it's nominally 15m, they also have a 20m one: https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=43328
Copper thunderbolt cables are only good for 2-3m, after which you need active cables or repeaters and fiber is easily the best option at that point.
HDMI and DisplayPort are good for a bit longer than Thunderbolt over copper, but not by all that much. HDMI 2.1 can only go to around 3m as well now.
So we're in a world where "long" is a mere 5 meters / 15 feet. This is why so many VR headsets are using fiber cables - it has to be long to enable the movement and logistics of connecting a PC to someone freestanding in a room, but modern video signals are just too hard to drive over copper at that not really that long distances.
