Well, they had to jack it up because the experiment (and the rats) would not go on for seventy years. And if the mechanism of action is anything like other types of radiation, risk is proportional to total lifetime exposure, not peak exposure.
Now take my hot beverage example and repeat it a bunch of times. I would bet that cancer incidence would increase in the scalding group. (as you're destroying epithelial cells and forcing them to regenerate... and cancer is really biological lotto).
To top all the above off. With the exception of the migration from GSM to WCDMA technology (GSM pulsed the radio), cell phone radio output power has actually been on the decline due to smaller cells sizes being used in cities. It's nothing like using an analog cellphone in the 80's was in terms of output.
https://www.cancer.org/latest-news/world-health-organization...
As to whether that causes cancer, I’m not an expert... I guess the ultimate measure will be actual cancer incidence rates but by that point, isn’t it arguably too late for many of us?
I’d love to see a study about background EM exposure in the various EM spectrum bands that are now in continuous use in urban environments. But it would be very hard to run such a study!
While that study would be tricky, I can think of devising a study in which rural cellphone users are compared to urban ones. You'd have to control for things like wifi calling and outliers with a tower next to their house but in theory background EM from base towers will be lower in the rural area, while at the same time output power from the mobile will be higher (because further from base station).
Honestly though, nothing is going to compare to the EM radiation of the Sun. It's like asking if hearing whispering will cause hearing damage while someone is screaming next to you. So, yeah I guess... hard to control. (this is why I only bring up user equipment exposure since it's placed inches from the skin, I think it's silly to worry about cancer from base stations)
Certainly by first principals of what we know, cell phone radiation should be harmless. But there's always the possibility we don't know something important yet, and given cellular radio's omnipresence, I figure it's worth humoring that possibility.
As for power output, I'm not a modem engineer but it sounds like GSM -> 3G -> 4G has progressively reduced power requirements by improving SNR & playing other tricks. Whereas with 5G, on the surface it sounds like the plan to increase bandwidth & performance is "take 4G and jack the frequency & power", so it's kind of the other direction and then makes sense why so many people are asking questions compared to the rollout of 3G or 4G.
There can be plenty of “hidden” effects for non-ionizing radiation for example we don’t know how the extra energy affects the molecular processes in cells you don’t have to ionize something to fuck things up a microwave would cook an egg without ever ionizing it’s molecules.
And if the mechanism is mocrowave heating, then power density driven heating rate is the first order effect.
Which 'if' is it? Perhaps neither of the above.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model
Then check out the idea of Radiation Hormesis:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis
It's an interesting idea.