This is interesting. USB 3.0 is under development and is said to achieve speeds of 4.8Gbs per second. That would transfer a song to an iPod in less than a second. The current speed of USB 2 is Mbs per second. Thats a ten-fold increase in speed. It sure would be nice to download an 8GB memory card from my camera in under a minute.
I also read somewhere that USB 3.0 is optical-based and will be backwards compatible with USB 2. I can't confirm that, although the speeds that the developers are talking about would almost need to require an optical interface based on today's technology.
What I find equally interesting is that ISPs are slowly beginning to deploy fibre optic lines to households around the world. Fibre optic is considerable faster than copper lines and should offer much faster internet speeds in the future. Fibre optic also provides superior bandwidth, so more information can be sent concurrently.
My guess is that we'll see fibre optic modems with USB 3 interfaces in the near future as well as USB 3 interfaces for television and phone service.
Erik