Radiation concerns halt Brussels 5G development, for now
brusselstimes.com
brusselstimes.com
“Last week, the various governments in Belgium once again failed to reach agreement on the auctioning of the 5G licences. The file remains stuck on the distribution of the proceeds. It will be up to the next government to handle the proposal, said Telecom Minister Philippe De Backer (Open VLD) last week.“
You say that it's fashionable moral panic but some people may say that an increase in cancer is not worth fashionable network tech investment.
Just as you might think that this 5G thingy is a must have and totally safe, some people might think that 4G works just fine so let's not risk it.
On another note, I would be open to the possibility that Satan is real and is the cause behind cancer if and only if the proper evidence is provided.
How much longer will you bash your head against the wall hoping it will get results?
I have no problem studying the effects of new products and technologies before being released to the general public. After all, I like knowing my drugs aren't likely to harm me. The difference here is radio wave exposure has being a subject studied to death and nothing of note has being found. Simply because you believe something to be true or could be true does not award you the right to make the assertion that it's true. Go get the evidence and bring something new to the table instead of torturing everyone involved with this nonsense.
I think radio communications have been heavily scrutinized, but there is a lack of peer-reviewed well-funded research regarding more controversial hypotheses, like their effect on Voltage Gated Calcium Channels. There's also been research that suggests DNA strand breaks do occur from non-ionizing radiation that has been suppressed, and other hypotheses as well that have not been studied extensively.
Also, I'm not just talking about cancer.
There is research from both the "it's safe" and "it's dangerous" perspectives. However, the "it's dangerous" perspective gets almost no funding despite being scientifically sound and published by scientists who used to be respected before they dared question EMF safety.
I have no doubts that current levels of EMF do not cause major issues in the majority of people. Our bodies have several evolved mechanisms to handle it. But I think it is very plausible that a minority of the population with other toxic burdens could be sensitive to it. There is an entire population of people migrating to rural areas just to avoid EMF so they feel better. I don't think they are making this up. It's a HUGE life change to do that, and no one would do that unless they had no other options.
I find the VGCC work of Martin Pall very compelling, but I do not have links on hand, as EMF is not something a spend a lot of time focusing on. Googling him will bring up plenty of info, but you will probably have to dig a bit to find his published scientific work rather than just interviews on holistic websites.
What's this a reference to? Last I read there was no established link between cancer and EM Radiation[0].
[0] https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/r...
I am a proponent of representative democracy, of checks and balances, and of democratic institutions that carefully examine problems making good use of all the expertise available.
Representing people is a two way street. It also means for politicians to tell people the truth and to convince them of supporting the right thing having considered all the evidence, trade-offs and shared goals.
Democratic institutions have a lot of resources available to them and a lot of time that the average voter does not have. They should make use of those resources, not lazily ape voters and exploit possibly irrational fears.
I guess if you still want to keep the democracy and have your 5G in Brussels you better convince enough Brusselians that the speed increase in networking is worth risking more cancer or that EM radiation definitely does not increase health risk.
But when I said that I didn't want to rely on average voters' risk percpetion, I didn't actually mean any of that. I merely meant that I don't rely on it to form my own opinion (which is definitely not subject to a popularity contest).
I don't want to convince the people of Brussels of anything. I want to know the truth about the health effects of 5G, and I hope that our democracies are not too dysfunctional to let that truth inform any regulations.
If we don't know anything about the effects of 5G, it could just as well be the cure for cancer.
But it's not a coin toss. We do know some things about how it works, we have decades of empirical data on similar technologies, and ultimately we always have to act in spite of uncertainty as even the effects of doing nothing are uncertain.
As I understand it, Brussels is governed by a parliamentary system, not a direct democracy. The advantage of such a system, in theory, is that these representatives can have cooler heads than the mob of common rabble outside.
Thus a good way to fix trash on the streets is to pay people to clean it up, and after a short while you can get clean streets with a very moderate level of cleaning effort.
Would you be able to share some scientific research that supports the idea that the proposed antennas are completely, without-a-doubt safe? (I assume that's what you're implying by your statment.)
Edit: ok, forget that I used the words 'completely' and 'without-a-doubt' which causes a knee-jerk reaction amongst the armchair epistomologists here. How about just evidence in general that suggests that they're safe?
edit edit: my apology if the phrase 'knee-jerk reaction amongst the armchair epistomologists' rubbed anyone the wrong way. just being snarky but perhaps wasn't helpful to the conversation.
Painting a wall a novel color is a new, unstudied EM radiation exposure.
("Assume safety and viscously attack anyone who suggests otherwise" has some advantages, though.)
Because we were wrong in the past about some things, I'm going to make the claim without evidence that visible light kills. Everyone who has ever died of cancer was exposed to visible light for very long periods of time. Don't expose yourself!
Can you link to a scientific study that proves anything is completely safe? Ironically more money has been spent proving electromagnetic radiation and vaccines are safe than most naturally occurring substances, because the public is paranoid about those things/it is a "sexy" area of research.
They've literally put animals into cages and exposed them to 1000%+ levels of typical EM exposure, and still not witnessed this supposed cancer link. But science cannot say anything is "completely safe" because that isn't how logical reasoning or the scientific method work. All we can say is that a mechanism of unsafety has yet to be discovered.
I am willing to change my mind if somebody proves why we need to upgrade but (and as much as I love new tech) "if ain't broken dont touch it", if anything just make it cheaper.
IMHO, 5G is not so much about speed as it is about latency and better handling of devices in high density areas. Regarding the speed aspect, keep in mind that most smartphones (which are the primary 4G connected devices) are not equipped with modems that can reach the speed limits of 4G. They certainly could, but that would kill battery life. I expect something similar with 5G (although one the promises of 5G is lower power consumption). VoIP over 3G is often terrible. It's better on 4G, but, in my experience, it's often hit and miss. Having improved latency and speed means VoIP (and video calls) are, theoretically, less of a gamble.
(My experience with 3G/4G is a single datapoint and should not be taken too seriously, evidently)
However, cheap 4G is a good option for areas that have decent cell coverage but poor broadband (I refer to the usual copper lines for DSL). 5G can make the situation better, if only by making 4G cheaper. Deploying 5G means that an operator may have to upgrade their backbone ... which is good for 4G users too.
You are correct but that will happen again with 5G and then with 6G and so on. After a period all networks will saturate.
I'm not sure if I'm right about this, but I think one solution could be to increase the network density with the deployment of small cell networks that provide a better local coverage and bandwitdh. A few companies like nokia [1] and ericsson [2] are taking that route.That also requires upgradation on hardware form the operator but at least spares the customer from buying a new equipment.
[1] https://networks.nokia.com/products/small-cells
[2]https://www.ericsson.com/en/networks/offerings/small-cells/o...
I am a software researcher in the field and I do not think this is the case. Most 5G deployments for the foreseeable future will be on 3.5Ghz. I do not think mmWave (30Ghz+) has been accepted for commercial use in any country. In fact, in many roadmaps mmWave is referred to as 5G NR (new radio), which to my understanding was left for later deployments. To give you an idea why: the mmWave receivers and transmitters (at my current facility) are the size of a door. I think the problem is shrinking those doors to fit your smartphone, but then again, I do not work on the physical layer nor have much insight regarding regulations.
RF bands 5G: n261 (27.5-28.35 GHz); n260 (37-40 GHz)
4G: B2, B4, B5, B13, B46, B48, B66
Verizon launched 5G New Radio (Nonstandalone) at 28 GHz with 400 megahertz of TDD spectrum — which doesn’t include the LTE anchor carrier, SRG said. Based on its initial survey, the firm estimated that there are close to 100 5G nodes in downtown Minneapolis, although it had yet to confirm how many of those were on-air. Each node has two Ericsson AIR 5121 5G radios, according to SRG.
https://www.motorola.com/us/products/moto-mods/moto-5g#specs
https://www.rcrwireless.com/20190405/test-and-measurement/pu...
It leaves more spectrum for 4G communications.
What I personally don't get about the whole 5G-craziness is why we (as a society made up of humans in contrast to consumers which fill the pockets of shareholders) need it? Today, we face a number of challenges which all result from our lifestyle requiring an unsustainable amount of ressources/releasing a massive amount of substances (be it fungicides (candida auris up front here recently), antibiotics or CO2).
Why do we "have to" go for artifical, industry-driven growth again, when we really should focus on increasing the efficiency (or even forgo implementation of ressource-using technology)? And 5G will entail a massive increase in power-consumption (more bandwith), the number of cell-"towers" [most frequencies applicable to WANs are already utilized – a lot of the promise of increased network performance now lays on microcells (e.g. every bus stop get's a basestation)] [1] and requirements on the network-clients (why stop at low-latency, if we can sell you 4K-video calls for your 8K-display...).
As for the "health effects": I believe that for classic networks the effects are negligible (though it's hard to reliably do studies on this. It's like with Dieselgate and the health issues...). What happens on the long term if you move around a city where every surveillance camera has a wideband (think radar and microwaves), 5-10W transmitter, beamforming that power to the receiving device unaware of any obstructions such as various bodyparts, which are definitely affected. I guess this is really something you should study (even industry agrees [2]). BEFORE DEPLOYMENT. Additionally the whole beamforming stuff with microwaves opens up really interesting possibilities: how about hacking your surveillance cameras+the basestation and then frying the eyes of some commuters sitting idly around. And with most of the devices operating completely on software and increasingly being single sourced, such stunts are becoming relatively easy to pull of.
[1] https://www.lightreading.com/mobile/5g/power-consumption-5g-... - "sponsored by Cisco Juniper Qualcomm"
[2] https://www.infineon.com/dgdl/Infineon-Health%20Effects%20of...
Looking at the bigger picture, and counting in energy savings innovations on the basestation/network level, and so on, it might not be a clear-cut "5G spends more energy".
I think you're a victim of the fallacy of eternal growth thaught for years by capitalist and communist economists alike (and even picked up by most green movements around the globe). If you realize that our consumption is way above it's sustainable limit, the only way to prove that we have really evolved from the barbarism of a pack of wolves is to try everything possible to fold back consumption into this limit.
And since we start crossing some irreversibility thresholds, this means acting now. So we should start cutting consumption and innovate existing technologies so that they become more efficient, instead of increasing consumption and hoping (which roots back to religion – it's kind of interesting that in a time of the decline of classic, philosophical religions, most of the people have adopted blind trust into technology, which does not recognise hardship or offer any consolence in it) for some random technological breakthrough (which would then need years to be adapted on scale – of course we can still search (R&D is not that big of a polluter (except for nukes))). I really would like to see some calculations for "the bigger picture", which show that 5G and the entailing consumption frenzy will bring us nearer to a sustainable society.
Practically for remote-controlled exvacators: why can't you just put a remote control-terminal ontop of the next fibre-"hub"? 5G (or at least the part, where you build small cells with high-frequency-bands) won't be deployed in Alaska anytime soon and this is something which you can easily add on todays infrastructure once you realize that it's actually beneficial. Maybe you should also take a step back on exvacation – with steel and concrete making up about 15% of carbon-dioxide emissions, I doubt that reducing transportation for construction workers (in industrialized countries, I doubt that any construction "worker" in China or Arabia has a car...) has anywhere near the same impact as a 5% reduction in construction.
But that is what 5G basically is, no?
And no, I don't think I'm a "victim of the fallacy of eternal growth". System-wise, any system that relies solely on continuing growth to keep itself going is certainly brittle and will start to contract or collapse once the prerequisites of increased growth are disturbed, or removed.
Furthermore, I don't think it is meaningful to abandon technological advancement just because some people think that people expect a global climate change deus ex machina from a university or corporate lab.
On the contrary, technology can really help, and I don't mean this in a blindly religious sense. We need solutions which scale and we don't currently have them. The solutions won't appear out of thin air or by magical thinking, they have to be willed out of the laws of physics and chemistry and mathematics and so on.
A good example is technology for capturing carbon dioxide at a price of under 100 USD a tonne. Add Fischer-Tropsch to that and you have fuel.
The slight problem is that the system which produces these advancements and, more importantly, can scale them to planet-wide scales is precisely the system that feeds on "eternal growth". If one disturbs or destroys that system, possible beneficial solutions won't be able to spread to all corners of the planet, thereby hindering the adoption of an innovation that takes non-trivial components to build.
To get out of that dilemma, the system must be transformed. Decentralization and distribution of for example manufacturing is required: once it's possible to print a functioning solar panel in your garage and use it to power your house, we're heading in the right direction.
Also, it's not just one dimension of waiting for technological advancements. "Reduce consumption", farm your own food, use your computer only on weekends, never fly anywhere, these will also work.
I'm not sure which consumers you're worried about here but it's likely not any real consumers.
4G sucks at coverage and handset count is nowhere near enough to justify 4G hardware and power consumption in most places.
3G yes, it sort of fell through between 2G and 4G - smaller coverage compared to 2G, smaller data throughput compared to 4G.
I don't have an answer to your question so I'm just speculating over here and it's quite possible that I'm wrong
I think as soon as that happens (someone shuts off a network) someone else will set up new networks to provide the old service.
Open source technologies exist to set up base stations right now [1]
I think we're headed towards an open spectrum future. Soon most communication could take place on unliscenced networks [2]. Or more and more networks could become unliscenced.
The G networks are not the only way to communicate. It is also important to note that the G networks are now simply internet enablers.
I don't have any data on this but I'd love a comparision of telephony and data services on use today. How much data people use in calling vs using Facebook for example?
Also consider that all telephony comapnies are betting big on IOT.How many IOT devices works on a G network?
If you have a modern device all you need is WiFi.
That however does not mean that telephone companies would cease to exist. Someone still has to provide infrastructure. They just won't have to spend so much on acquiring liscence s. Which also means more competition from unliscenced providers.
Device manufacturers would be able to work on a common network technology stack.
By the way I don't have anything against 5g. I also don't quite understand health implications so I'm unqalified to talk about it. But I don't like having to buy a new device just to use a new network.
8k on a mobile device doesn't seem all that logical imho. 720p or 1080p is already pretty good on a tiny screen.
This makes logical sense, but isn't the case in my experience. Many games look noticeably better on my Switch's 720p screen than on my larger 1080p monitor, despite running at native resolution (720p handheld vs 1080p docked) on each.
https://elisa.fi/kauppa/#!/nettiliittymat/mobiililaajakaista (Finnish)
Edit: looks like DNA's 4G Max plans go up to at least 880Mbps based on users' speedtest results: https://bbs.io-tech.fi/threads/nettiliittymaesi-taemaenhetki... (Finnish - the 15ms+ ones are from 4G)
Cellpone towers are also different in that you can't choose not to expose yourself to them. In contrast you can choose not to get a mobile.
On one hand, 6V/m seems like a lot; I haven't been able to find a reliable regulation site. On the other, 20V/m is apparently common (https://www.arpansa.gov.au/understanding-radiation/what-is-r...).
The question isn't whether you can immediately sense its presence, the question is the effects of sustained exposure.
And the fact that the placebo effect is a real thing doesn't really tell you that one way or the other.
By standing next to the tower. That is a known effect from high power radio transmitters. You can feel that because it's starting to cook you the same way a microwave oven does, to varying degrees depending on the transmitter power. If you stand too close to a large military RADAR transmitter it can kill you dead on the spot.
Then the response is referring to studies done at the power levels of an individual cell phone, and no surprise it's difficult to feel that. But the effects of long term exposure are a different matter.
Moreover, with 5G they're increasing the density of the towers, which implies building towers with closer proximity to people.
There's been tons of studies on this. All (reputable ones[0]) indicate that there is no danger.
[0] I specify reputable because there are some pretty shady studies. Shady because: results can't be reproduced; exposures given are many orders of magnitude above what a person would receive; suspicious funding; non-reputable journals; etc
The truth is this is very hard to measure. You have something that happens over a period of years and is difficult to control for. How do you find a group of people in modern times who haven't used cell phones in the last decade, but at the same time are not a group of monks or Amish people with so many other lifestyle differences that everything is hopelessly confounded?
Being hard to measure isn't the same as not existing. The question is, what choice do you make when it's hard to get good information? Build a lot more radio transmitters that may or may not be a major contributor to the modern trend of increasing cancer rates, or prefer wired networks that don't?
This just tells me you're looking for conspiracy and distrust.
To comment implying that there's no way to measure, you definitely can. You look at cancer rates over time (we have that data). You also look to see if there are correlations with growth in areas where cell phone usage increased faster than in areas that were slow to adopt (this even happens in America, and we have this data). For example, New York more quickly adopted cell phones (and other radio technology) than Montana.
Just because you can't figure out how to measure something doesn't mean it isn't an already well established practice that has been verified through many different studies. Many different disciplines use this method as well. The nice thing about this method is that it is also easy to test to see if researchers are p-hacking or doing other types of data manipulation that one would expect if there was a conspiracy going on.
Industry funded research, for all industries, is inherently unreliable because they get to choose whether to publish it after they've seen the results. This is not a conspiracy, it's just what actually happens. They're generally not going to publish a finding that hurts their business or exposes them to litigation.
And then you're here: https://xkcd.com/882/
> You look at cancer rates over time (we have that data). You also look to see if there are correlations with growth in areas where cell phone usage increased faster than in areas that were slow to adopt (this even happens in America, and we have this data). For example, New York more quickly adopted cell phones (and other radio technology) than Montana.
At which point you're back to different lifestyles and many confounders.
Worse, availability of mobile phones affects human behavior directly, so you have to somehow account for the consequences of those behavioral changes that directly correlate with mobile usage.
Also this: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Doing this properly is hard. So hard that people generally screw it up at least a little bit. Then we get studies showing both positive and negative results, but they're all flawed in at least minor ways so everybody gets to point to the flaws in the studies whose result they didn't like.
See also: Replication crisis.
In practice the result is that we don't actually know the answer, so the question is what we should do when we're not sure.
Also you're confounding the experiment. You can't do this just over New York and Montana. You do it over a lot of places. Over many countries. Plus we have other ways to test this. You can look to see if radio waves heat tissue. The fact is cell phone radiation (radio waves) are non-ionizing and unless you turn the power WAY WAY up, it isn't dangerous. Both these methods are well established and we know what we're doing. So after just these two (there's been others) we have two experiments that match our current theory.
I want to repeat that. Experiments are fitting our theory. Not hypothesis. Theory. We've been studying electromagnetism for a long time. We've been studying radio for a long time. The data is matching well established theories.
This is completely different than your jellybean case because that doesn't match any good hypothesis. There's no underlining reasoning for why only a green jellybean causes acne. That doesn't deny the jellybean correlation, but that's all it is at that point. Correlation. Which is different than causation. To graduate to causation (which is actually the thing being pointed out in that xkcd) you need to give reasoning. There are plenty of things that correlate that don't cause. [0] That's where theory comes in. But if you can't establish a good link, then you just have [0] and people laughing at you.
Tldr: go talk to scientists.
tldrr: you aren't smarter than domain experts (in their domain)
tldrrr: don't shout replication crisis when the issue we're talking about has been replicated with similar results with multile well established methods.
The problem here is that the media wants simplistic answers as "healthy or not healthy" but studies don't have such conclusions. What studies find out is "eggs increase X and decrease the probability of Y happening". This is not about science being difficult but an understanding of the outcomes being difficult.
This is also how some people try to discredit science. For example, I was highly irritated by Dilbert's creator's argument on defending Trump's climate policies, he said something about swimming after eating previously deemed hazardous but now declared safe, therefore you can't trust experts.
Was this documented during a test or just anecdata?
This sort of thing happens quite a bit actually. In this case, a huge number of residents complained ofvarious illnesses that were supposed to have been caused by a new tower being built in their vicinity. That the symptoms were presented when the tower was not operational is fairly telling that nocebo effect dominates here over any rational or explainable occurrence.
That being said, it does, as 32032141 suggests, tell a fair amount about nocebo effects.
implies that it was documented during a test
How would you know if it’s just in your head?
I monitor my muscle spasms (and the rest of my body for that matter) fairly closely. The spasms don't happen often, maybe once a month or two (at most? Not sure... it's rare..) if I'm not carrying a cell in pocket with the data connection on.
Please don't say "just" in your head. It's implying that psychological conditions aren't as significant or real as physical ones. They are very real and need to be treated just like anything else.
The muscles in your legs that are effected, are they biological muscles? Your legs aren't the artificial limbs your username is referring to, are they? Your story is much more plausible if your legs are artificial.
But all those giant corporations always want to sell you more devices, more expensive services, show you ads faster, track you and spy on you better, make more excuses to raise prices, harm competition, etc.
"Two areas of the body, the eyes and the testes, are particularly vulnerable to RF heating because of the relative lack of available blood flow to dissipate the excess heat load."
source: https://www.fcc.gov/engineering-technology/electromagnetic-c...2) The WHO has an article written in 2014 that says:
"Several studies investigating potential health effects in children and adolescents are underway."
I'd say that the lack of updates 2 years later is concerning.source: https://www.who.int/en/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/electrom...
+ https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/wireless-devices-and-he...
+ https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/human-exposure-radio-fr...
Sufficiently intense microwave exposure can be a health hazard but there's nothing subtle about it, like there is with ionizing radiation which can make you sick days or weeks after exposure or give you cancer.
For 5G in particular the radio waves will tend to not penetrate as far into you body. Some militarizes have actually developed non-lethal crowd control weapons that cause a burning sensation in the victims' skins with the same sort of ~100GHz waves used by 5G but at a much, much higher power than the FCC would allow for consumer devices.
I put my hand on an antenna coupling plate for one of those through the glass CB antennas, and keyed the mic. This CB transmitted at 4W. It truly felt like someone heated the tip of a dagger and stabbed the palm of my hand with it. Unbelievably painful.
Counter to it significantly, there's a heap more powerful non-ionizing transmission than things you have locally in very similar bands, like hundreds of kilowatt TV and FM radio transmitters. Any "effect" you would be seeing is placebo or nocebo depending on the state of your "airplane mode" switch.
This nonsense is no better than anti-vax parents that believe because two kids at her children's school were diagnosed with autism and had vaccines that it must mean vaccines cause autism.
If you're going to make claims like this, at least provide some evidence otherwise it's not constructive to make such claims.
What is this supposed to do?
I've seen some (very disturbing) values of 20W/square meter reported. Is this true?