Samsung Electronics supplies 53,000 5G base stations for Korean carriers | Hacker News Reader

Samsung Electronics supplies 53,000 5G base stations for Korean carriers

rcrwireless.com

29 pointsoctosphere10 comments

I'm Korean and it I am personally worried the health of Korean tech companies.

Korea claimed to be the first country to start 5G but who wanted 5G so fast? The Korean government wanted it. The government set the goal to become the first, then pushed (I would say "ordered") the all three mobile operators to launch 5G, and the three operators launched it at the same time first in the world. In other words, the government artificially made the demands for 5G base stations only for Samsung.

Samsung has grown in this way. It is now the one of the well-kwon companies in the world and this single company earns around 15% of Gross Domestic Product of Korea. Samsung is big enough and can service without being fed by the government. I doubt the government-driven tech development would work forever.

You know what, there is no IPv6 available in Korea yet. Something doesn't sound right to me.

Is there any actual scientific research on human / animal health risks that has been repeated or is it just FUD?

Non-ionizing radiation cannot hurt you unless it is of sufficient intensity to cause thermal injury.

Swedish and Finish doctors has warned against 5g.

http://www.5gappeal.eu/scientists-and-doctors-warn-of-potent...

What is the base station ratio of 5g stations to 4g stations? Or does it vary widely depending on city and terrain?

an older article shows 173,000 LTE base stations. these appear to support 4g as well, so likely these are replacements.

They say currently around 10% of the estimated total number of 5G base stations to cover countrywide installed. So it only works in Seoul, the capital city in Korea. They estimate 5G will cover the whole country in 2023.

FYI, because of its frequency characteristics, the cover range of a 5G station is much shorter than that of a 4G station, almost one-fourth of 4G. So much more base stations required than 4G.

The U.S. is also using 600mhz, 3100-3500mhz bands, which should have ranges equal to LTE. Though with lower switching costs, which should lead to fewer towers?

Base stations in dense cities may be reduced because of the decreased traffic per tower.

I'm not an expert but it won't have difference in that case I guess. The current Korea's 5G is deployed at 3.5GHz whereas 4G is usually at 1.8GHz in Korea, so it would have shorter ranges or the technologies is not mature yet. The articles describing the current 5G deployments are a mess so I'm not sure.

However, 5G won't have any significant advantage over 4G in those frequencies other than a little bit improved throughput. The ultimate goal of 5G is to use frequencies above 6GHz, usually around 28GHz (!) in order to have sub-1ms latencies and ultrafast throughput. This requires numerous "small cells" deployed.

I found unbiased sources below. You will find that these articles assumes the frequency above 6GHz should be used.

[1]: https://www.gsmaintelligence.com/research/?file=141208-5g.pd...

[2]: https://spectrum.ieee.org/video/telecom/wireless/everything-...

So Korean would be the Guinea-pigs for testing affects of 5G on human health. I can foresee tech companies/regulators in rest of the world silencing health concerns on 5G by quoting Korea as example.

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