  Data transmission at the upgraded Large Hadron Collider experiments, foreseen
for mid 2020s will be in the multi Gbit/s range per connection for the
innermost detector layers. This paper reports on first tests on the possible
use of carbon cables for electrical data transmission close to the interaction
point. Carbon cables have the potential advantage of being light, having a low
activation and easy integration into the detector components close to the
interaction point. In these tests commercially available carbon cables were
used, in which the filaments had a very thin nickel coating. For these cables
data rates beyond 1 Gbit/s over more than 1m with an error rate of less than
10^{-12} could be transmitted. The characteristics of the cables have been
measured in terms of S-parameters and could be reproduced with a Spice model.
Some outlook on potential further improvements is presented.
