Bytes: What’s new in tech
Drone delivery gets real
UPS is rapidly expanding its drone delivery service to get prescriptions safely to seniors, said Adam Shapiro in Yahoo.com. The
Federal Aviation Administration has been working with UPS on regulations for drone delivery that could be finalized next year. In the meantime, the parcel service’s subsidiary Flight Forward has partnered with CVS to “begin using drones in early May” for prescription deliveries to the 135,000 residents at a Florida retirement community, the Villages. The drones will first go to a “central location in the community, where a UPS ground vehicle will complete the run.” Depending on how the test goes, it could be expanded to deliver to individual homes. UPS is competing with several other drone-delivery efforts, including one owned by Alphabet, Google’s parent company, that is testing in Virginia.
Faster home Wi-Fi
Get ready for “the biggest Wi-Fi upgrade in 21 years,” said Jacob Kastrenakes in TheVerge.com. The Federal Communications Commission voted last week to crack open a previously unlicensed plot on the nation’s wireless spectrum, freeing up “more airwaves—a lot more—that routers can use to broadcast Wi-Fi signals.” Routers currently can broadcast over two frequency bands,
2.4 GHz and 5GHz, but these have become congested with too many competing signals in recent years. Adding a third band, 6 GHz, should offer “faster and more reliable connections from the next generation of devices.” The new band is “spacious enough to handle up to seven maximum-capacity Wi-Fi streams to be broadcast simultaneously” without interference.
Hanging up on video-call hell
Endless phone calls and video chats in quarantine are forcing us to come up with new ways for cutting a conversation short, said Joe Pinsker in TheAtlantic.com. “The world used to be rich with excuses: I should probably get home to feed my dog; this was fun, but I have to go to another party; and so on.” But “the locked-down era calls for more creativity.” A reasonably convincing white lie is “Another call is coming up,” or try “I have to go make lunch.” What about quietly slipping out of a group chat? One way is the “frozen face” approach: You “freeze your face and body in place for a moment, to make it seem as if the Wi-Fi has gone out, and then very carefully, off-camera, hit the End Call button.”