Month: April 2019

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Henrik5000)

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai is proposing a $20.4 billion rural broadband fund that could connect up to four million homes and small businesses over the next ten years.

The new program will be part of the Universal Service Fund (USF), and it will be similar to an existing USF program that began during the Obama administration. In 2015, the USF's Connect America Fund (CAF) awarded $9 billion for rural broadband deployment—$1.5 billion annually for six years—in order to connect 3.6 million homes and businesses.

Carriers that accepted the CAF money are required to finish the broadband deployments by the end of 2020. Pai's proposed Rural Digital Opportunity Fund will be the follow-on program, an FCC spokesperson told Ars. The fund would "inject $20.4 billion into high-speed broadband networks in rural America over the next decade," the FCC said.

Sometimes, you've just got to pause for a moment to appreciate great feats of engineering.

On Thursday, before it took off, the Falcon Heavy rocket stood on a Florida launch pad and packed the energy equivalent of a tactical nuclear weapon. Then, as it launched, all of this energy poured forth from 27 engines in a meticulously controlled explosion for the purpose of sending a 6-ton satellite into geostationary orbit.

The single image below, of those 27 engines burning against the sunset backdrop along the Florida coast, may in some small measure put that achievement into perspective.

Enlarge / Laser beams illuminating unit of Diode Pumped Green Laser. (credit: Forrest Anderson | The LIFE Images Collection | Getty Images)

The data usage of the modern world is absolutely mind-boggling. We have giant, air-conditioned buildings dedicated to shuffling bits around at high speed. And for what? To ensure that Instagram can tell Facebook to tell its advertisers that you really love rubber duckies.

Vicious truth-telling aside, the infrastructure underlying data centers is based on lasers that are modulated at high speed. Thanks to some recently published research, however, the latest and greatest of the hardware currently in our data centers will start to look very slow. A speed-up of about a factor of 10 may be just around the corner.

Birefringence is your friend

It turns out that the key to making a laser go faster is to make it a bit shoddy. Let’s break that down.

Enlarge / Samsung's UBS-K8500, introduced in 2015, was positioned as the world's first UltraHD, 4K Blu-ray player. (credit: Mark Walton)

In its annual Theatrical Home Entertainment Market Environment report, the Motion Picture Association of America described an immensely sharp drop-off of physical media sales over the past five years. According to the data, which was obtained from DEG and IHS Markit, global sales of video disc formats (which in this context means DVD, Blu-ray, and UltraHD Blu-ray) were $25.2 billion in 2014 but only $13.1 in 2018. That's a drop in the ballpark of 50 percent.

Don't expect 8K Blu-rays or other emerging quality-focused formats to turn the tide, either. Market data published by Forbes showed that the aging, low-definition DVD format still accounts for 57.9 percent of physical media sales, and 4K Blu-rays are only 5.3 percent.

Samsung introduced the very first UltraHD (that's the industry certification for 4K discs) Blu-ray in 2015 but told the press it was stopping manufacture of Blu-ray players in the US this year—and not just 4K ones, either. Chinese OEM Oppo made a similar announcement last year, though Sony and Panasonic continue to make dedicated Blu-ray players. Also, Microsoft and Sony's game consoles still play Blu-rays.