Month: April 2018

Enlarge / New York, USA - January 14, 2016: A Verizon worker on Worth Street in Lower Manhattan. (credit: Getty Images | 400tmax)

More than two-thirds of New York City's 3.1 million households have just one or two broadband providers offering service to their homes, according to a new "Truth in Broadband" report issued by the city government. The report comes as NYC pursues a lawsuit against Verizon alleging that it hasn't met its broadband deployment obligations.

There's only one ISP offering home broadband service at 13.54 percent of the city's 3,114,826 households, meaning that nearly 422,000 households have just one "choice." Another 55.44 percent of NYC households—nearly 1.73 million in all—have two broadband providers. The remaining 31.02 percent (more than 966,000 households) have at least three broadband providers.

The report defines broadband as Internet service with at least 25Mbps download speeds and 3Mbps upload speeds, the same standard the Federal Communications Commission uses to evaluate broadband deployment progress nationwide. DSL offers some more choice, but the network technology "is not generally capable of delivering a 25Mbps download speed," the report said. The report's broadband deployment statistics are based on federal data as of December 2016.

Enlarge / Is this essentially the same as a kid buying a box of car skins in Rocket League? (credit: Getty)

Four publishers will be forced to make changes to their games in the Netherlands after a landmark report from the Netherlands Gaming Authority found their loot boxes violate laws against gambling.

Study into loot boxes: A treasure or a burden? (PDF) notes that an in-game loot box violates the country's laws if "the content of these loot boxes is determined by chance and... the prizes to be won can be traded outside of the game: the prizes have a market value."

While the report doesn't identify the now-illegal games directly, a report from Dutch news site NOS names them as FIFA 18, Dota 2, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, and Rocket League. Six other studied games that do not allow for items to be traded for a "market value" were found not to violate the law.

Enlarge / ABB, BTC Power, Efacec, and Signet will work with Electrify America on this new network of fast EV chargers. (credit: Electrify America)

As its legion of comment-posting fans love to point out, Tesla's Supercharger network is a major part of that company's success when it comes to selling electric vehicles. For over a century we've lived with cars that can be refueled in minutes, and old habits die hard. Even though the optimal solution is EV owners plugging in each night, the thought of being stranded with a slow-charging EV but hundreds of miles to drive in a day causes enough terror to rule out such cars for many potential drivers. If we want more people to make the switch, the answer then is more chargers and faster chargers. And Electrify America evidently agrees.

An offshoot of the Volkswagen empire created in the wake of the diesel emissions scandal, Electrify America has a quite ambitious plan. This week it announced it had picked suppliers for a new network of fast chargers across the country. Between now and the end of 2019, it's going to deploy 2,000 fast chargers at a total of 484 charging stations. There are still a mix of competing standards when it comes to EV charging, so Electrify America's approach is to offer them all.

That means 50kW CHAdeMO connectors and then dual-handle CCS1 chargers, capable of 50kW as well as either 150kW or 350kW (using liquid-cooled cables). Vehicles capable of charging at that higher rate aren't on sale yet, but by sheer coincidence that matches the specs of forthcoming Battery EVs from... Volkswagen Group.

Enlarge (credit: Samuel Axon)

Apple may be losing the fight to add another OLED display manufacturer ahead of the next iPhone production cycle. According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, LG Display is struggling to make the OLED panels Apple wants for upcoming iPhone models. Apple has been working with LG, hoping it could become its second supplier of OLED smartphone panels. Apple currently sources the OLED panels for the iPhone X from rival Samsung.

The report claims that South Korea’s LG Display ran into "manufacturing problems" that held up display production, causing LG to fall behind Apple's pre-production timeline. Apple reportedly asked LG to go through a third round of prototype production for the OLED panels, an unusual step for most component manufacturers. Ars has reached out to Apple for further comment.

If LG can't fix the problems it has reportedly been having and satisfy Apple's needs, it's unlikely that the company would be able to provide finished OLED panels for the next iPhones. According to people familiar with the matter, mass-production of fall-scheduled iPhone models typically begins in July.

Enlarge / Differences in the density of water reflect light to show the complex mixing generated by a moving brine shrimp. (credit: Isabel Houghton, image obtained with the assistance and facilities of R. Strickler)

If you've heard of krill at all, it's probably in the context of their role as whale food. Nature programs love to point in amazement to the fact that the largest animals on the planet subsist on some of the smallest, namely the krill. But these tiny animals exist independently of their function as food, and a new study suggests that they and their peers may have a significant role in their ecosystems: mixing up the top layers of the ocean.

Krill are crustaceans, as a careful look at them will indicate (although Wikipedia tells us that the cool-sounding name "krill" is simply Norwegian for "small fry of fish"). They don't tend to grow much larger than a couple centimeters in length, and they feed on even smaller creatures, taking tiny photosynthetic plankton and moving them up the food chain.

But what they lack in size, they make up for with truly astonishing numbers, with some species estimated as having one of the largest total biomasses of anything on Earth. It's these vast numbers that make them a viable food for the world's largest creatures and give them the ability to replace the vast numbers gulped down by whales. It's also at the heart of the new results.