More to the point, it would be impractical to use them on /glass/ cables.
Perhaps make it so that detector/splitter cables are updated every so often (several thousand ticks would work) based on the surrounding cables. Among the cables touching the detector cable select the highest resistance cable and mirror it's output; during scans other detector cables should be detected as a cable with infinite resistance and not allow passage. This would have an unfortunate side-effect of making each type of detector cable take up several damage values.
That would work. Several damage values would not be needed, as they are tile entities when placed, and don't need to store this information when in your inventory.
Edit: You could then use 50% detector cables and 50% glass fibre...