What Is A USB Port?

A USB port is a standard cable connection interface for personal computers and consumer electronics devices. USB stands for Universal Serial Bus, an industry standard for short-distance digital data communications. USB ports allow USB devices to be connected to each other with and transfer digital data over USB cables. They can also supply electric power across the cable to devices that need it.

Both wired and wireless versions of the USB standard exist, although only the wired version involves USB ports and cables.

USB devices and cables support multiple versions of the USB standard from version 1.1 up to the current version 3.1. USB ports feature identical physical layouts no matter the version of USB supported.

USB ports are an alternative to the serial and parallel ports available on older PCs. USB ports support much faster (often 100x or greater) data transfers than serial or parallel.

For computer networking, Ethernet ports are sometimes used instead of USB. For some types of computer peripherals, FIreWire ports are also sometimes available. Both Ethernet and FireWire can offer faster performance than USB, although these interfaces do not supply any power across the wire.