5G Is Likely to Put Weather Forecasting at Risk
hackaday.com
hackaday.com
This is something I've been having trouble with.
Lately I've become more aware of the secondary effects of 5G- on weather forecasting, on the radio spectrum, possibly on bees- and it's got me wondering why we need it for telecom. I just don't see the value added. I can already communicate with anyone in the world, access any information, and find my way anywhere with 4G. A significantly higher rate of data transfer just doesn't seem to add any new functionality to my phone. Can anyone give me a good rationale for 5G? Entertainment doesn't count.
I'll grant right-off-the-bat that it'll have some fantastic industrial applications; my issue is with personal telecom. It just feels like a new planned obsolescence vector.
In all likelihood prices will go up as 5G requires a massive infrastructure deployment of very expensive hardware, spectrum licensing, and they'll have to pay to transmit and receive that data to the internet. All of those additional costs will be passed on to customers.
...that said, from the other comments, it sounds like 5G would make this issue worse...
The high frequency ranges suggested for 5G seems useless, they'll barely be able to penetrate windows.
Increased coverage would be far more helpful than faster speed in most countries.
But suppose I wasn't a neoluddite and I was easily excited by digital salt shakers. As it stands, all of these products could be using wifi, which would still give me, the consumer, the ability to firewall them. That would let me access them on my LAN without letting them talk on the internet. The idea of putting 5G radios in them instead of wifi radios seems to be to deprive me, the consumer, of the opportunity to firewall them.
If you want an automatically adjusting fridge, that can and should be implemented without the cell radio too. Put a RFID chips in food packaging that requests a particular temperature; the fridge then sets itself to the lowest temperature requested. A fridge that instead broadcasts the contents of your fridge to some corporation that does not have your best interests at heart is an abomination, but I do not doubt that whichever corporation starts selling them will try to mask this by framing their spy devices as ecologically friendly to make it seem morally unassailable.
[1] I have to also say generally, as some of the MVNOs do tend to lower data prices over time. There are some bargains to be had there, just with lower network prioritization.
As it is, there are some cheaper options as well (eg, consumer cellular or other MVNOs).
Cable boxes will be replaced by subsidized free smartphones in exchange for "always on" subscriptions. No more home WiFi for low-end market.
Personally, the industrial 5G IoT applications are far more interesting.
What does this mean? Something beyond video? VR?
My instinct is that there are diminishing returns past a certain point. We're certainly not there yet, but once cellular networks allow you to stream high-definition VR content and upload data at the same rate, it seems like there's nothing more that additional bandwidth could add.
I see it as a philosophical issue... bandwidth is for the transmission of information, and there's only so much information that a human being can receive and provide at a given moment. At some point you're running up against the maximum bandwidth of the human user.
It's like Netflix versus cable television - you can push the equivalent of hundreds of 1080p streams through a broadcast cable television, but attempting to push on-demand IP packets to an equivalent number of subscribers would bog down horrifically if they even attempted to stream a single show (let alone how you have cable tuners that can tune multiple shows at once).
What you need there is something much more akin to broadcast television - either a digital OTA video broadcast (good ol' digital television), or a microcell using multicast to broadcast a stream to any interested party.
(of course your phone probably doesn't have a DTV tuner, but when a RTL-SDR dongle is like $20, you should probably be asking why your phone isn't integrating that functionality. These days they don't even have FM tuners on phones anymore... despite the fact that in virtually all cases those are already built into the cellular chipset. IP-based singlecast is not a good paradigm for a lot of the use-cases that people come up with, it's just that it's the most profitable one for carriers, so it's the only one they'll support.)
Of course, this could also be accomplished with DTV tuners, but there's a much higher probability of users having a 5G chipset on their phone than having a DTV tuner capable of tuning to multiple channels and an antenna.
It's the same as what the app is currently doing, just with multicast groups instead of singlecast. And by doing so, you reduce the network load by N/M, where N is the number of users and M is the number of streams each user runs on average.
Don't get me wrong, I understand that this probably isn't currently implemented, but that's the kind of thing we should be looking at, before we decide to screw up weather forecasting and radioastronomy so that you can see your NAAAYYSSSCARR.
Even 5G is going to get eaten up under certain types of load, so it makes much more sense to look at ways to reduce traffic, the easiest of which is broadcasting rather than singlecast.
This isn't the place for cheap comments like that.
Even if you have a point ideologically speaking we live in the real world where consumer money talks louder than forum comments. 5G is coming whether we like it or not because of people wanting to stream data for entertainment.
Well there is this famous quote "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." from 1943 and it turned out to be very wrong.
"High-definition VR content" isn't the same as "indistinguishable from reality". When movies were first introduced to theaters, with small frames per second rates, without color and without any sound on the medium itself, people were quite stunned and e.g. took cover when a the movie showed a train approaching at high speeds. Nowadays it seems primitive to us from a technological standpoint.
There is a trend that some people don't accept lossy audio encoding. Maybe one day, videos will get a same trend and people want lossless videos, in full 360 degree VR, intensity resolution beyond perceptual limits and constantly high enough angular resolution for your eyes to foveate any area of the screen and see no pixels. That's quite a huge amount of data to transmit. Add in buffering so that you can seek, etc.
As for genuinely new forms of media, I could think of some: full-body experiences with feeling of touch, smell, etc either live or recorded possibly professional in a studio or just you sharing your last vacation to venice.
Taking it further: uploading your consciousness to a body which is a large distance away, making physical travel of humans mostly obsolete: Maybe one day we can represent the brains of human individuals as data and send it with light speed around the earth and throughout space.
Personally, I used my home gigabit extensively the first few months... but a year later I frequently find myself still tethered to my cellphone's 4G plan. It doesn't make a difference except once in a blue moon when I want to download something big.
5G is also going to need to have better coverage than anything ever made before if its to replace in home wifi. As it stands I drop calls when I walk into different rooms of my house on the data connection. 4G drops to 3G or even edge all the time going in and out or between buildings. That being said, I'm waiting to see what route telecoms pounce on to force us into 5G use. Will they degrade other data connections or go the planned obsolescence route? Either way, they are going to get their return, this isn't done out of technical altruism.
Edit: that said, I would probably also be pretty happy with a 4G plan that I could use for this purpose.
Anti zero-rating laws prevent broader adoption in U.S. (and possibly for good reason. Can't have 2-3 pay-for-play gatekeeping apps to the Internet)
IoT applications are typically very low-bandwidth. The main issue is cost and power usage.
From cheap, slow, long range deployments like LoRa (100 devices sending tens of bytes) to satellite broadcast (any number of synchronised devices), and a few things in between.
Perhaps, Jevons paradox might be more apt in this case, as huge investments in 5G Infrastructure indicate that 4G/LTE efficiency/usage ratio has peaked.
Nevertheless, any nascent demand for next-gen media in the next few years can be served via 5G NR, Wi-Fi 6 and inter-related standards like Wi-Fi HaLow,Vantage etc.[1] and Blutetooth 5 with synergistic and overlapping features, until 'real' 5G establishes itself, sometime in the next decade.[2][3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
https://www.computerweekly.com/microscope/opinion/A-modern-t...
[1] https://www.wi-fi.org/discover-wi-fi/wi-fi-certified-6
[2] https://www.networkworld.com/article/3342158/cisco-exec-deta...
[3]https://www.wsj.com/articles/from-wi-fi-to-bluetooth-to-5g-a...
Insert any VHS vs BetaMax or AC vs DC historical lesson here. The best tech does not always win.
If carriers, smartphone makers, and chipset manufacturers all agree on 5G, then 5G will "win".
They could adopt the default position suggested by you and do nothing; it will certainly be favourable and indeed profitable for all the incumbents in the short term, but they will only be postponing the inevitable. A new generation of mobile standard is a well-trodden path, from the beginning of 1980's with the advent of 1st Generation of wireless telecommunications and every decade since then. It is without a doubt paved with riches and there will be winners and losers ─ however, the biggest driver has been innovation and not just about the 'win' and to suggest that 5G might fail is pure fantasy.
It is a non-sequitur to compare stand-alone video formats with a constellation of technological advancements, encompassing a multitude of disciplines, which have had a profound impact on us.
Also, before anybody comments something about 5G helping out in broadband deserts, I'd argue that point is invalidated by the reduced penetration depth due to the much higher frequency of 5G. Let's just invest in rural broadband instead
Which are?
Sure, if all that extra growth does not translate into increased well being for the median, or if it can't lift those out of poverty who need those efficiency gains that led to "growth", then, no, of course that growth is useless.
However. Growth is amoral, and most economists are trying to understand the economy, not normatively influence it. (Though there are a lot of oped and blogs by economists.) And how the economy works, how does that growth happens is not up to the "modern economy", it's up to people. Politics.
Modern economics is the religion of Cassandraism, anyone who understands what's going on is unable to persuade others. Look at how the Net Neutrality debate went down the drain, because somehow libertarian/dumb free market advocates can't comprehend that zero-touch no-regs complex systems have a tendency to end up in a pathological state. Or look at how people still can't believe that a bail-out was better for the economy short term, and how trying to do central planning without honest signals likely won't work.
And this doesn't mean that it's easy to figure out these things, or that there's a 100% idiot proof way to get magical silver-bullet solutions, far from it. But it seems pretty straightforward that blindly ignoring those who study these things all their lives and just repeating a mantra - be it socialism or libertarianism - is not exactly helpful.
Summing up some of the other comments: 5G isn't about (personal) communication per se. No more "accessing the cloud". With 5G we'll be wrapped in the cloud. Etc.
I'm not saying it's imperative we go there. Only that that's where we're headed. For better of worse. Like it or not.
We need 5G for self driving cars
We need 5G for industry automation
We need 5G for IoT (because that makes so much sense, lol)
We need 5G for ...
Or, you know, it's not like traffic signals move around on their own, so they could just be hardwired.
So 5G is not needed for that purpose at all.
The sub-GHz 802.11 seems to be uniquely american thing. And maybe just pushing anything over RF is somewhat uniquely Czech thing (caused by the fact, that Czech spectrum allocation has somewhat unique additional 10GHz ISM band), but in Prague there is an giant nest of smallish microwave antennas on every tenth street light pole (the extreme is probably Malostranske namesti, where there is 10GHz link between two traffic signals that spans about 70m).
Also, while its true one could just wire up all of these fixed devices, these wiring costs would massively drive up the cost of implementation. Trenching city streets to lay new cables costs a lot of money, just ask Google.
A cell tower has more than a single channel and a city with a thousand traffic lights is going to have many cells, so using existing cellular generations is not going to run into problems with collisions from 1000 traffic signals trying to send data at once.
My point is that a city with a thousand traffic lights will be covered by hundreds if not thousands of cells, so the issue of traffic lights competing for bandwidth for a single source is non existent.
And this problem doesn't change for 2G, 3G, 4G, or even 5G. Perhaps 5G can scale better but if you had a single 5G tower covering an entire city, it too would run out of capacity.
So the shorter distance the 5g signals go also mean more towers with more connections. My point is, don’t focus on the speed as being the huge innovation, it’s the number of devices possible. Although once it’s available, you will see apps come out that you may not have expected that take advantage of the higher speeds to do cool things.
But yes, we need to move in the direction of 5g or something similar to allow the tech you listed to take off.
Talking to myself
Crying out loud
Only I can hear me, I'm
Stuck inside a cloudLast thing I need is a data connection so fast it can burn through my data cap in 5 seconds.
You're doing that thing where people say it isn't something only to reveal in a few extra sentences that you mean the opposite. "It's not imperative but its going to certainly happen."
Just the facts Jack :)
pretendscholar is asserting that because it will happen, it must happen. You're arguing that it need not despite the fact that it will.
So the quoted comment to me says "it doesn't need to happen (not imperative) but it's what likely will happen (where it's going)". No internal inconsistency.
End of the day, as shitty as Spectrum and Comcast are, they are a better devil then the AT&T corporate offspring.
The biggest first off would likely be the end of wifi as we know it, so in turn, an increasing number of IoT devices for the home/workplace/elsewhere would be built without the need for complicated wifi setup, and all syncing between devices would likely be done using a cellular setup. "Cable" would likely completely go away, where companies like Verizon realize they can deliver all TV over their 5g network. The constraints relating to numbers of devices on a wifi router will be backgrounded, ect.
Another key piece is that there will be far more nodes in a 5g deployment, so you could do better triangulation for GPS. It will have lower latency so even tighter real time applications can be done over the internet. This list can go on and on.
Can you explain what specifically about 5G makes this possible? I don't know anything about it, but if the logistics and pricing for it are anything like 4G, I have no interest in paying my telecom an extra $5/mo per device when I can throw them on my own network for free.
I'm skeptical, very, but the appeal is obvious if it works and the pricing isn't obscene.
I don't see any of these things happening with 5G.
5G is more like roaming wifi, and the data rate drops rapidly to the point where (iirc) if you're more than a couple of hundred meters from a tower it's no better than LTE. Why would I want this?
I'd rather see more work put into usability than in even higher speeds.
Also, We still haven't even hit theoretical 3g speeds. But reallocation of spectrum is a quick easy way to get there without doing the work.
video streaming
For those who haven't, Shadowrun is a fantasy/cyberpunk RPG, and since the most recent two editions, everything is wireless. Everything. Cameras, locks, guns, you name it. Which makes it a lot of fun for a hacker to brick an opponent's gun in the middle of combat. Or, of course, use a security camera's wireless connection to get into the larger system behind it.
I hope real world security will be more sensible than that, but signs are not encouraging.
But I believe the rule or gentleman's agreement in Shadowrun is that something you paid Essence for (you pay Essence for cyberware and bioware) is part of you and cannot be hacked. Though I believe there have been adventures where for plot reasons it was possible. Shadowrun is not entirely consistent in that regard, I'm afraid.
Also, wired connections (especially outdoor ones) have a tendency to be vulnerable to things like wire cutters or fiber-seeking backhoes. I'd imagine a competent security system implementer would find some way to physically secure the cable as best as possible, but given that a wireless jammer is a much more sophisticated attack strategy than, say, some snips or an "accidental" strike by some piece of equipment, going wireless might be a viable tradeoff.
Cameras that use fiber exist, but you could also just use an ethernet camera and a fiber to ethernet converter.
> Also, wired connections (especially outdoor ones) have a tendency to be vulnerable to things like wire cutters or fiber-seeking backhoes.
I once encountered a survivalist who would always carry a length of fiber optic cable with him, that way if he was ever hopelessly lost in the wilderness he needed only to bury the fiber and a backhoe would be along promptly to dig it up.
One solution in those cases is to use directional wireless, which is harder to jam, but then you're back to not needing 5G.
If it's important enough you can also attach a storage device directly to the camera so that if there is a temporary network interruption the data isn't lost.
Of course, you also have the trouble that the cameras themselves tend to be vulnerable to things like rocks. Securing something which is out in the open is hard.
> given that a wireless jammer is a much more sophisticated attack strategy than, say, some snips or an "accidental" strike by some piece of equipment
Jamming wireless is not really that sophisticated. It's both easy an inexpensive to do it. The main impediment is that the legal penalties can be rather severe, but criminals are not well known for their fastidious adherence to the law.
Google Fi is for people who mostly use wi-fi. (I use Google Fi)
T-Mobile is “unlimited data” until 50GB, then they limit your speed.
5G as I've understood it also more about latency.
There's an international petition [0] and one in Switzerland [1] that I know of - please sign if you agree.
[0] https://www.5gspaceappeal.org/
[1] https://www.change.org/p/p%C3%A9tition-contre-la-5g-et-ses-d...
That being said there's absolutely no reason why 5G (or even 4G or low Earth orbit Sat) couldn't compete with cable companies on latency. In many places 4G is already lower latency than existing cable networks.
Edit to add: 4G also already offers fast enough connections for 4K and in many places 8K streaming. It's the total capacity that isn't there - they have to put data caps on so people don't do all their streaming on their mobile connection. 5G is more about removing data caps than providing faster speeds.
Citation needed, this seems like FUD.
https://www.pathophysiologyjournal.com/article/S0928-4680(09...
Some excerpts:
"Panagopoulos et al. [99] exposed fruit flies (D. melanogaster) to radiation from a mobile phone (900 MHz) during the 2–5 first days of adulthood. The reproductive capacity of the species reduced by 50–60% in modulated radiation conditions."
"The authors concluded that radio frequencies, specifically GSM, are highly bioactive and provoke significant changes in physiological functions of living organisms."
The paper references over 100 studies in total on the subject of biological RF effects.
But it's what like 90% of users use their devices for! :-/
Sorry about that, but you (and me) are a minority.
Nice emoticon, btw. It definitely didn't make me completely disregard your opinion.
Over the last decade we've gone from using 5 hours of data per subscriber to less than 4 minutes, and potentially down to 20 seconds. Similarly, latency went from 400ms ping to 5ms.
This improves network performance, since the tower is more likely to be available when you need it, and faster too, even if the average throughput and backhaul link remains unchanged. It also improves battery life because the battery is primarily draining during active comm sessions. Get them in faster, serve them faster and back to sleep faster.
Think of it in terms of Apple's MacBook. The finite resource here is more complex as it's both thermal and power. The CPU tops out at an average of 1.3GHz but it has an instantaneous turbo-boost to 3.2GHz. You could say that 1.3GHz is pretty fast and gets the job done, if it represents the same TDP, why bother going faster? The answer is it improves your experience (lower latency on bursty workloads). It also improves your battery life because it's more efficient to spend 1/3 the time at 3.2GHz and 2/3 the time sleeping than the whole time at 1.3GHz. I think Apple described it as "racing to get back to sleep."
Obviously this breaks down with sustained workloads, though I'd argue the same is true of 5G.
You're making the classic IT-guy failure of talking about the technical feature rather than the user outcome (I have had to train myself out of this in recent years so I'm not having a go at you).
I sometimes forget to plug my phone in, maybe after traveling, maybe after drinking haha. I'm already super glad my phone will make it through a second day. Back in the iPhone 3G days? Not so much.
expected benefits >> costs + supposed negative externalitiesCan I get an argument against the 5G standard that doesn't amount to, "This may cause harm through an unknowable secondary mechanism despite roughly 100 years of evidence that it is safe."
If you don't need it then why would you do it? There is no need for an argument to not waste money on useless infrastructure. E.g. Why not build only 4 lane highways instead of a side streets? Because it's unnecessary.
The burden is on you to justify the expense and I don't see any clear justifications as to how this is in anyone's best interest outside of the telcos and <5% of users.
According to Pew Research, 95% of Americans own cellphones. 75% of the world population owns cellphones. When you include other mobile networked devices that number goes up if only a little. Any infrastructure improvement to the wireless telecom infrastructure will benefit the vast majority of the world's population. Even people who insist on using 4G will see major benefits due to less congestion as people migrate over to 5G systems and guess what, the 5G standard includes keeping the 4G system intact and running so this isn't a planned obsolescence but purely an expansion of capability!
Historically, nearly all infrastructure development has yielded significant positive returns not just for the capital holders (Telco's) but for the users as well. While we can certainly extend additional 4G coverage, 5G has a significant number of technical improvements that allow for better backhaul network and network management. Once the initial development costs are paid, there is no reason not to use 5G access standards over 4G.
Most of the 5G mmWave standards are backhaul for the foreseeable future. These enable low cost, low latency deployments to areas which are currently undeserved because of the costs of deployment. This is important because it enables technologies like tele-robotics. It would allow rural areas to invest in a surgical robot at their local hospital and have an expert surgeon working from a more prominent location potentially saving lives.
There are standards for out of channel spectral masks to prevent problems like (including specifically) the one postulated in the article. There exposure standards for safety that the military has been researching for decades as part of their radar work in the mmWave band. I've yet to see any concerns that were not specious and certainly not from anyone familiar with the technology. Most of the concerns are just repeated talking points from dozens of other older technologies that never showed any substance with a helping of, "It's different THIS time." So, you're right, it's not funny, it's sad to see people on Hacker News arguing that 2010 was the ideal level of technology and we shouldn't bother trying to develop more. Hell, it's literally the same argument Comcast makes on why broadband standards shouldn't be raised. "What people have is good enough and they don't want more so you can't justify the costs to improve!"
The 95% of people who own cell phones don't necessarily need internet faster than 4g on their phones and would be happy with that working reliability, which it doesn't.
>It enables technologies like tele-robotics. It would allow rural areas to invest in a surgical robot.
That sounds good and all, but shouldn't we just build out the fiber network so that we have actually reliable infrastructure instead of janky bullshit running on a proprietary cellular modem? What level of reliability should a surgical robot be? I'd say 9 9's for myself to use it. Can a cell signal transmit perfectly 99.9999999% of the time with those low latency numbers ? I don't think so since it's relying on atmospheric conditions and no interference to function.
Ironically, 5G will further reduce incentive for the clearly useful technology of fiber to be deployed at scale.
supposed benefits << cost and expected negitive externalities
Why should someone be allowed to implement a design at scale without testing and solving the downstream problems first? That's not how engineering works.
I don't work on cellular infrastructure, and don't even work on IoT anymore, but I could imagine that as far as IoT infrastructure is concerned, it might not be that any specific devices need a large amount of throughput to provide their services, but that the aggregate of a potentially very larger number of devices needing access to data services could test the throughput of the collective infrastructure, and redesigning that infrastructure to be able to have more throughput could be key, not to a future with some magical usecase of some specific types of devices, but to a future with a much larger number of simple networked devices working in concert to make the world more efficient in the aggregate.
That said, is the timing right? I don't know. It does kind of seem like it is driven more by politics than technical necessity.
Extra battery life is a feature, not an outcome.
Nobody is wandering around wanting their phone to last longer purely for that sake.
You're looking for a user story where only looking at the corollary makes it obvious that battery life enables everything else.
Suppose you shipped a phone with 99% less battery life than its competitors. You could, at trivial expense, increase your 1% to 10%, your engineers propose how to do so.
You reply, "My phone lasts longer and that lets me _____".
To which your engineers reply, "Use your phone?"
Grab an iPhone 3G and use it for a few days. That's what going back from 5G to 4G will be 5 years from now. Just as it is going back from 4G to 3G today. You've just gotten used to how good things are.
I just set my phone to 3G, where I'm getting a speed test of 15mbps about 1/10th what I get on 4G typically.
Everything seems to work the same way it did on 4G. Actually I'm surprised by that because I thought 4G had been a bigger improvement.
That's a sale-able outcome: more and more people are using the spectrum so if we don't upgrade to a more efficient use then the outcomes you currently enjoy (video chat, gaming, virtual desktops whatever it is you do and value) will stop working because of the traffic.
avidity I say
As I understand it, 5G is more about network scalability than about improving end-user experience (though of course end-user experience falls off a cliff if the network reaches saturation).
If we were all happy to sit on our own in silence, eating the same local crop day in, day out, then very little would be developed.
For an idea of scale, the entire VLA was built for ~80 megabucks. The entire Atacama Large Millimeter Array was built for 1.4 gigabucks.
Things have changed quite a bit over past 20 years. Launches are getting much cheaper now, and satellites are getting smaller. I imagine costs could be brought down, especially if the scope of the mission was limited to e.g. simple constellation for radiointerferometry.
Also, the positioning error isn't the whole story; there's also timing drift. Rubidium GPS-disciplined oscillators actually drift too much instantaneously to be useful...
Besides, as another poster noted, VLBAs need extremely precise positioning which is just another rabbit hole. Spektr-R orbit determination was really tricky for its baseline of 300000+ km.
See p.8 and 10 for those used in the current state of the art telescope at 160MHz https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/pdf/2013/08/aa20873-12.pdf And https://cdr.skatelescope.org/#photos?lfaa for those used in the SKA, one of the largest future radio telescopes that is still under construction.
Getting the distances between the telescopes is actually easier in space. Both distance measuring and datatransmission could be done with lasers when there is a clear line of sight. Moreover, once an orbit is established, the laws of Kepler are 'followed' and predicting their mutual distances is something we can do extremely well. On Earth with very long baselines it is much trickier and things that need to be taken into consideration are cablelength differences due to temperature changes, tides and continental drift. (Continental drift is actually measured with radio telescopes: in the reverse problem when the location of a set of sources on the sky is known to high precision one can establish at what speed the distances between the telescopes is changing.)
I suspect an optical (laser) emitter could transmit either directly to Earth or to a retransmission satellite at GSO that already has a beefy radio downlink, and also serves as a regular comm sat.
The black hole pic was cool, but you know what would make it even cooler and higher-res? Using the same technique with an even wider array (interplanetary) telescopes.
That's precisely what Millimetron/Spektr-M aims to do, but it still needs the ground part. You can't put the 100m Green Bank Telescope into orbit.
If it were about collectivism copyright would be about 5 years and noone would get paid more than a few times the median.
> Sure, but what is important for me or you individually is not how we should make decisions on policy affecting everyone collectively
That's important. Our own interests are important. It's equally important that we discuss why our interests are important enough to disallow others from pursuing theirs. And then persuade others to our side. So don't dismiss someone for having an opinion in contrast to anyone else, argue the opinion itself.
A few or more of those and we have real loss in biodiversity. Maybe your "local river" can sustain that for a bit - but overall they are all important.
Maybe the economic benefit of 5G would be enough to justify a one time cost of a telescope launch, especially if US, EU, and Russia all pitch in.
A primary design goal was terrestrial signal rejection; we would get nuked by ABQ Traffic Control radar etc.
I haven't kept up. I suppose I should find out.
The thing about sweat glands is interesting. And sadly I have no idea how to evaluate the quality of the studies linked.
Your neighbor can blast 24 ghz right at your house with a free licence:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1.2-centimeter_band
The reason microwaves (like from a microwave oven) are dangerous are because of their power levels. Like, they'd cook you if they leaked out. Not because of ionizing radiation.
Nope, they wouldn't. The standing wave would break down as soon as it left the enclosure. It would still be a potentially harmful amount of radiation, but not like that.
And no, 24 GHz is not in common use. It's used for special applications, mostly highly directional tower-to-tower links (I have one sitting on my roof for a high-bandwidth HAM radio link). With 5G, it will be ubiquitous in an unprecedented way. We've already seen plenty of interference with 5 GHz.
Of course, there's a lot of fearmongering whenever RF radiation is involved, but there are genuine safety concerns.
Source: HAM radio operator
Yeah that's a good point
>And no, 24 GHz is not in common use. It's used for special applications, mostly highly directional tower-to-tower links (I have one sitting on my roof for a high-bandwidth HAM radio link).
That's what I mean by common use. Omnidirectional antennas aren't in common use.
Professor also admonished us that such technicians must always be infinitely certain that the transmitter is not operational at the time of service.
It's a good thing your professor is not a tower technician. No self respecting technician climbs up a tower without knowing his potential exposure.
There is a reason both the US FCC and EU ICNIRP have guidelines for human exposure, and if you are a tower technician you wear a personal RF densitometer to ensure you are not exposed above these levels.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_RF_safety_monitor
"Electromagnetic field densitometers, as used in the cellular phone industry, are referred as "personal RF safety monitors", personal protection monitors (PPM) or RF exposimeters.[1] They form part of the personal protective equipment worn by a person working in areas exposed to radio spectrum radiation."
And even with a densitometer, when working on high-powered live equipment, you also wear a protective suit:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/Nardaler...
I hope you forward this information to your professor. Industrial RF radiation is not something you want to play around with.
Not so when it's a huge multi-tier tower - that's your whole body facing the tower getting that dose.
I'm a software engineer, a technologist, by trade and I was in complete denial about this until I started getting serious eczema that only went away when I stopped using wireless gadgets and avoided staying too long in areas with cellular base stations.
I denied and denied and denied but repeated experiments on myself only revealed how my body reacts to this stuff. My ideal power density is less than 1mW/m^2 to not break out. And there seems to be a relationship to what LTE bands the tower is transmitting on - outside the US I seem to do better. It could be the frequency, or could be the modulation.
You can erase all references to your professor and swimwear tower climbing from the text. Hats off to him! And again, sorry for the mistake.
Still, I couldn't resist a vision not unlike the penultimate and electrifying golf scene with Bill Murray & the bishop in Caddyshack.
https://emfscientist.org/index.php/emf-scientist-appeal
ctrl-f for "PhD" shows 126 results on the page.
Electromagnetic radiation is used as a signaling medium for countless lifeforms on earth, including the cells and microbes in our own bodies.
Imagine if some alien creature decided they wanted to flash relatively bright blue light across the entire surface planet, day and night at frequencies that known to induce epileptic seizures. It'd affect your quality of life and mine. For some people, it'd be devastating.
Just because we can't see it, doesn't mean it's not there.
I fail to see how a blanket dismissal of peoples concerns, however uninformed many of them may be, counts as "rational"!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority
Show me one species that uses GHz signalling.
Instead of appeals to authority, why can't we work with the facts and evidence that we have already (those overwhelmingly disproving the health hazards of 5G)?
"Peoples concerns" equate to the desire to halt all human progress out of some bizarre mix of paranoia and Neo-Luddism.
It's an inconvenient possibility (not going to call it truth) that our technology might be hurting us. We're addicted to technology the same way smokers are addicted to nicotine.
Smoking was at one time considered healthy and promoted by doctors, and now where are we?
If it doesn't cook you like microwaves or causes radiation sickness 3 hours after exposure it is immediately declared universally safe.
Of course that's negligent at best. Looks like we will live through in vivo testing for those questions, I suppose.
Yeah well, I'd like to see that overwhelming evidence please.
But since, I am not a biologist nor physicist, I could not really examine it in detail. So I would have to believe the authorative power of the experts who day it is all good.
Then I compare the arguments to the experts who say yes.
I took a random one for the country I live in: According to wikipedia, this person who got his PhD in 1973 and has since retired has done research in 'quantum philosophy and spirituality'.
The second one, retired also, is a biologist who researched subterranean mammals. He and his team got an Ig-Nobel price in 2014 for their finding that dogs align themselves to earth's magnetic field when pooping.
I'm not sure I want to continue.
Well actually that seems like relevant information for this topic, because if that is true it means that dogs can sense magnetic fields. And as we know RF waves are composed of both an electric and magnetic component.
So this guy might actually know something that the rest of us do not know. If dogs can sense magnetic fields, it means electromagnetic radiation could have an unknown impact on their sense of direction. Sounds important to me.
Here's another guy that seems to know what he is talking about.
Prof. Olle Johansson, Ph.D., Dept. of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institute, Sweden
Seems like someone you might want to listen to, especially since he has participated in several studies on this subject:
https://www.cellphonetaskforce.org/the-work-of-olle-johansso...
You can also find his talks on the subject on Youtube, which I suggest people watch. They are very easy to listen to, and provides a good introduction to these topics.
Then we have this guy:
Dr. Paul Héroux, Ph.D., Director, Occupational Health Program, McGill University; InvitroPlus Labs, Royal Victoria Hospital, McGill University, Canada
He was commissioned by the electrical power companies to actually invent the RF dosimeter in 1991, that many use now to gauge exposure levels.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1930308
I'd certainly want to know what he has to say. Let's look at some of the rest:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=H%C3%A9roux%20P%5B...
Several publications relating EMF exposure. I think we want to know what he has to say also.
So perhaps you should not have give up so easily, and continued to look a little further instead. We want to look for the people who have the expertise in this field, and listen to what they have to say.
To finish off, I'd like to know where are the scientists that have studied this subject as extensively as someone like Heroux or Johansson, and are willing to sign their names on a pledge of microwave safety for all of humanity. I haven't seen such a list.
"The 5G recommendation for global irradiation. Go ahead, we take responsibility for full irradiation." In fact there is no such recommendation, as both insurance companies and even the cellular manufacturers are increasingly distancing themselves from liability.
That's what I call a clue.
But microwave links are P2P and directional, using narrow beams at a certain height so that humans (or other objects) don't get in the way. That will not be the case with 5G.
Despite the fact that this spectrum has never been used for any widespread purpose, we're rolling it out and the burden is not on the implementers to prove that it is safe. It's basically on researchers to both prove, publicize, and convince society as a whole that 5G has health impacts.
I am not going to go all conspiracy-theory and say that the research is being suppressed but certainly funding for this research is not going to be a priority for the US government, as they've been thoroughly bought and paid for. Most research into health effects of non-ionizing radiation is not funded from the US government, so draw your own conclusions from that.
The bad news is that there are and will be entrenched interests that will likely try to "work around" any health concern, and maybe, potentially we will hear that the existence of 5G is worth it. (For example the tech advantage helps with healthcare more than the radiation harms us.)
The only thing I can think of is 5G will allow for more overall network bandwidth, so the data caps on "unlimited" plans wouldn't be needed. But compared to how we use our phones today, what new items will be be able to do with 5G that we can't do with current 4G/LTE?
They're not even needed now. It's all about money.
But a truly unlimited 4G hotspot service would crawl to stop during busy periods.
Some sort of rationing is needed.
That said, I'm not suggesting companies deploy 1:1 infrastructure in lock-step with sales. Power/Water companies plan for peak demand periods. What prevents ISPs from being able to do the same?
No data caps, so you can use terabytes of data without throttling if you want to.
WISP internet service to the home.
I wonder how 5G home internet will compare to the up and coming LEO satellite constellations (StarLink for example).
Disclaimer: I have contributed to a muni fiber project, and am familiar with trenching/arial mounting and premises termination costs.
In many suburban developments, the power/communication lines are all buried underground. It would probably be much easier to install a couple of microcells around the neighborhood than to dig up everyone's lawn.
I was lucky enough to live in a neighborhood where Verizon initially installed FiOS. It was a massive undertaking. They had to trench every street in my development. I was young at the time, but I remember thinking how massive the effort was considering not every house would even sign up for it.
They ran aerial fiber to the neighborhood, and then ran the fiber under each street, with the final run being placed in the backyard easement between house rows (with a Ditch Witch doing the heavy lifting).
Family member is going from AT&T DSL for $40/month with 3Mb down/1Mb up to $50/month for 200Mb down/75Mb up (with a two year price guarantee and no data caps). It’s quite the deal.
At no point does a fiber installation require digging up an entire road or even your lawn.
I spent a decade on various WISPs, even had one of their towers on my house (free connection + cash = very yes). It was a city with a mix of single family homes on small lots and townhomes/condos. Cable doesn't exist there, so WISP was the way to go. It was pretty good until Netfix got popular. It was bad in the evenings when everyone would sit down and turn on a show.
Now I'm in a very rural place, lots of hills, thick trees. Luckily there is a telephone/internet co-op who put in fiber. I think they realized with the distances they have to cover that WISP and copper were out. I've never seen fiber to such remote locations.
We only have one cell tower that covers us now, so I won't hold my breath for 5G.
1 https://www.bizjournals.com/columbus/news/2013/08/27/ohio-st...
2 https://www.dispatch.com/news/20180405/ohio-state-to-spend-n...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ax#Technical_improv...
I assume with 5G we're just about at the point where you could ditch the home internet connection and go 100% cellular.
The two reasons I still have dedicated home internet at this point are data caps and latency (gaming). Otherwise, my phone usually gets comparable - or better! - speeds than my home connection.
Microsoft's One Drive was doing a constant upload/download one week, refreshing itself constantly, costing me $200. Ugh.
Historically, I think the fear among people like those here was more or less two-fold.
1.) The original top 1% downloaders were mostly those downloading lots of "Linux distributions" (and of course many other types of media) over torrents. I'm sure quite a few of those 1% ers were on sites like this and preferred to effectively be subsidized by the 99%.
2.) Whether or not it was just a rationalization for #1, many made the argument that bandwidth caps would constrain innovative services because if you turn a meter on, people are going to use bandwidth-intensive services a lot less and the Internet will be less generally useful as a result.
The dynamics today are probably a lot different. I imagine the profile of a big home bandwidth consumer now is a family that watches a lot of Netflix and YouTube.
And I hate Comcast. The $50/mo to unlock true unlimited internet was absurd.
I actually cancelled my Comcast last month and went to Century Link. The overall speed is slower, the lack of data cap and being 1/3 of the price has been worth it.
It feels good to no longer be giving them any money, especially after their billing would routinely "forget" discounts that were supposed to be on my account. I got offered free Starz for 3 months and $30 off my bill for the coming year, which just happened to only be there for a month... So after calling them to have the issue fixed once, and then seeing it happen again the very next month, I finally cut ties.
At least where I live, T-mobile towers are at least occasionally congested. Its not too uncommon for data to be slow or even non-functional with good signal levels (on my smartphone, don't know about this home product).
I am in Minneapolis and Century Link has managed to become the primary secondary option to Comcast. Some neighborhoods are lucky and have US Internet's Fiber as a third option.
On top of that, Century Link has been pushing hard to expand their fiber. I am relegated to only 40MB connection on the copper connection in my neighborhood right now, but the technician that came out to do the install said that (unofficially) they're hoping to have Century Link's fiber be an option in the next year.
$45/mo for 40MB. Will be $65/mo for fiber. Still a fraction of Comcast's insane rates.
With 5G and recent increase in cell tower coverage. We are almost there.
The only result of 5G would be the end of public wifi which typically has 5 - 10 mbps speeds.
Not if they charge anything close to what they charge now.
People will continue downloading < 1 MB per request, it will just be much faster
From a consumer perspective, LTE's great in its current form, I've never seen any actual person complain about network speeds in a region where LTE is properly deployed, I don't know of any application that struggles on this infrastructure.
Aside from that the real reason money is being poured into 5G appears to be to replace the last mile / home internet.
In order to be a realistic alternative for internet service, the cost would have to come WAY down. Using the cell system for your primary internet feed right now is prohibitively expensive.
I have a hard time believing that the cell companies will actually lower their pricing for 5G. It seems more likely that they'll do the exact opposite.
Their solution is to IMEI lock the plans to these mains-power wifi routers the size of an old AirPort Extreme, and QoS them to have lower priority than their pay-per-GB mobile customers. That way it can't be abused for people to use it to replace the (still-expensive) mobile plans, and the lower network priority means that they're just taking up unused network capacity anyway.
There's a ton of interesting things, like 5G is for a lot more than cellphones. I've always heard that 5G will have phased array and I wondered how that would work -- he talks about possibility that the array is on the roof of a car and your devices will connect back to that. Lots of issues, like size of antenna and power consumption, to get those blazing fast speeds.
The best “feature” of 5G is that it’s a great opportunity institute rate-hikes.
I can see it now. "$100 additional per month" But you can cancel your cable/DSL now!
5G has the potential to provide throughput and latency that is comparable to a fixed broadband connection. In reasonably competitive markets (i.e. not the US), that's A Big Deal. Latency is a particularly acute issue in many applications; 4G generally adds about 50ms in the best case scenario, but 5G can easily provide sub-millisecond latency. Imagine a near-future where it simply doesn't matter whether you're on WiFi or cellular, because they both provide the same experience.
-- Keep in mind that I know nothing of nothing.--
--- Is the sub-millisecond from repeater to repeater or from origin to final destination that's [n] repeaters away? Won't each repeater introduce its own latency?
What causes the 4G's >50ms response time?
So let's say you're in Scotland, the packet would enter the mobile operator's network, then go to London, where they've bridged the network to the internet.
So there's an extra there and back again.
For example you can have a 5G core over LTE.
Your 4G results also seem quite bad, my personal test right now was more around 18ms broadband vs 31ms LTE. Google scholar results (https://scholar.google.de/scholar?hl=de&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=LTE+l...) I looked into seemed to suggest LTE is capable of ~20ms latency results, while (http://wirelessone.news/10-r/1007-lte-latency-today-9-ms-dow...) suggests that LTE-A (3gpp release 13) is capable of 14ms latency.
Latency-sensitive applications over 4G/LTE, like SSH or games feel sort of sluggish.
I think you forgot how slow 3G was/is. It's around 512KBps. You can stream music on that, but streaming video is a straight nope (480p on youtube wouldn't even be happy with 3G) and even just browsing the web will be a frustratingly slow experience.
4G LTE definitely has the bandwidth to do all those things are reasonable quality/throughput particularly for the resolution & form factor of the device in question, though.
The original 3G UMTS (384kbps) was indeed dreadfully slow by today's standards.
That was just a US thing though, right? Where I lived it was branded "Turbo 3G".
Isn't LTE already being branded as 5G in the US as well?
In very congested areas, the total supportable capacity is already being completely utilized. This is why people in very congested areas experience call drops or problems with network availability. 5G would go far to resolve this.
However, that's the only consumer-level benefit that seems realistic to me, and it would only be noticed by the people in dense areas. All the other stuff, such as increased speeds, etc., appears to be nonsense.
If 5G uses almost the same frequency where microwaves detect water vapour (around 24 GHz), won't the weather have a great impact on it?
Also, I always thought that such small waves would have problems with obstacles, with good signal just when your phone is in line-of-sight with antennas.
IMO 5G is massively overhyped. My iPhone 7+ isn't limited by 4G LTE, it's limited by Verizon deciding to only allow it 10mbps down (with great signal). 5G won't matter one bit if the current bottleneck isn't 4G LTE in the first place.
They spend massive amounts of money on marketing, at that doesn't benefit the product at all.
THIS!!! Even if more sites are added, each with their own 10/100gb fiber run - it's still running to the main circuit for a region. That circuit isn't changing(in the near term), this will just consume more of it. Regions without colossal backbone access that are already bandwidth constrained will remain bandwidth constrained.
Network bandwidth is still going up and up in speed. 100G was very expensive and hard to do only a few years back, now it’s becoming standard. DWDM systems continue to evolve.
Perhaps it's different in USA, though, the geography and population density differences mean that the backhaul problems are different than in Europe; but here the bottleneck is on the radio side.
One of my biggest memories of 9/11 as a school-boy was when all phone-lines were so congested that no one could call their parents. We all kept trying, but it was "busy" tones all the way through.
That's the only time I remember land-lines all being too congested to make a call, but it was part of the event that a lot of us talked about for days later. Some of the kids were trying to call their parents to see if they were still alive, because some of them worked at the Pentagon. (Their parents were fine, but they too couldn't contact their kids because all the phone-networks were too congested. I presume everyone was trying to call each other at that time).
Its the only time in my memory where I got a busy-signal from picking up a phone. You didn't even dial yet, it was too busy to even give a dial tone.
For the kids out there: texting wasn't common yet, and pagers weren't really worth the trouble. Pagers worked like text messaging today, except you didn't have a screen... so it was hard to use and weren't really used very much. You called a pager using a land-line, and then dialed "44 33 555 555 666" for "HELLO". People generally still just did phone calls for simple messages like "I'm okay".
This is in fact a limitation of 4G.
A single device is fine, but there is only so much bandwidth available. When you get lots of devices in the same area, something has to be limited.
Speedtest.net (with Verizon hosted servers) was at a very consistent 50mbps/4.5mbps which would make sense for my unlimited plan.
Please note that speedtest.net is REALLY not a good representation of real world network usage, and I don't just mean like how they throttle netflix. They get to host the server in-network as well as full traffic shaping to get those juicy benchmark numbers.
Lack of competition and sensible operators isn't 4Gs fault...
so... sorta like a WiFi access point?
WiFi has no built-in system for authentication across different operators, no system for accounting usage, no system for ensuring trust.
This is what 3gpp brings. Their systems are hopelessly convoluted, and have some issues. However, it works.
In other words glorified wifi, except the AP is no longer owned or controlled by me.
There's a general misunderstanding about the technology that leads people down this road of thought.
5G is broken up into two frequency ranges, FR1 and FR2. FR1 is everything below 6Ghz and encompasses the same spectrum as traditional cellular technologies. FR2 is everything over 24Ghz and that's the bit everyone is confused about.
FR1 is like traditional cellular and will be slapped on cell towers to provide broad coverage over a wide area with performance characteristics similar to what we have today with LTE. It's not very exciting but it's 5G and this is what everyone is currently rolling out.
FR2 is meant to be absorbed, otherwise you'd have a big problem. Unlike FR1 which limits you to 100mhz bandwidth per channel, FR2 mandates that channel bandwidth be between 50-400mhz. So at a minimum, an FR2 channel will have half the maximum allowable bandwidth of FR1. If FR2 propagated more than a very short distance the airwaves would be quickly saturated by a small number of users.
FR2 is intended to be deployed in very dense areas like indoors. You'd be able to deploy many cell sites without worrying about overlap or signal propagation because everything from walls to moisture in the air will absorb the signals.
It might also be possible to slap an FR2 cell site on top of every lamp post going down a street.
Samsung's 28Ghz solution was rated at something like 1500ft at maximum power. So one per city block might be more realistic than one per lamp post but it will ultimately come down to capacity. The mmWave portion of 5G is designed to high density deployments.
The problem is that omnidirectional (so non-directional) radiation causes the problem, not fixed point-to-point links. So, with the omnis the best idea is to limit their TX power and spread the noise via ultra-wide band multiplexing (using random orthogonal coding [which is CDMA or lately frequencies (subcarriers/subbands), which is OFDMA] minimizes the interference), but with the p2p links, you can go wild, use a relatively high power high frequency narrow band high symbol/baud modulation (like QAM256 - used in 802.11ac wifi).
But of course cables rule, because they are really great at containing the EM radiation. And lamps already have cables to power the lamp, and the micro-nano-pico-cell thingie will also need power too, and then you can just do Power over Ethernet and be done with it, and then concentrate the copper wires and switch to fiber.
Though probably the p2p mesh backhaul module would be pricey, but sometimes getting your cable to a switch is equally problematic/costly, so that's why probably a bit of both from a cost perspective too.
Stuff for your personal cellular use would never come close to covering the costs involved. And 4g will still be used for many years to come for that.
5G covers 3 variants: 1) massive broadband (with mmWave in particular); 2) URLLC - Ultra Reliable and Low Latency Communications; 3) massive IoT. The current focus is on (1). Lot's of talk on (2), but nothing much concrete yet. (3) is moving along, but it's actually based on... LTE.
Strictly speaking, 5G is a set of requirements defined by the ITU-T, not a technology. The actual technologies are developed by another organization, 3GPP. And there are 2 technologies to cover 5G: 1) NR, or "New Radio". This is what most people mean by 5G. It's for massive broadband and URLLC; 2) LTE (release 15 and later) for massive IoT!
Yes, the IoT variant of LTE (LTE-M and NB-IoT) will be the 5G implementations for a while. Eventually there will be new NR versions for IoT, but nobody is in a hurry there. LTE-M and NB-IoT evolutions will be just fine for a long time, as far as massive IoT is concerned.
When you hear about 5G deployment today, it really mean "NR" and not LTE based IoT. The concern for smartphone is really capacity during peak time in the busiest cells.
I work in the field BTW, as you may have guessed ;)
I personally think the entire mmWave part of 5G is at least another 10 years away. Like, that's just going nowhere. Massive bandwidth? Great, what for? WiFi will be mmWave before we have an application for that in cellular.
Presumably what is actually being deployed is the incremental LTE revision on the same old bands, some extra thrown in that were yoinked from other applications.
My main exposure of the 5G area was the parts around the move to Network Function Virtualization. I wasn't deep in enough to know the ins and outs as you clearly do, I was extrapolating from what I know.
Here's my reasoning, feel free to poke holes.
Background: The hardware boxes used for network functions supplied by Nokia, siemens and the like were very expensive.
Telco profit margins have dropped massively as people make less regular calls and SMS, and use whatsapp and viber (over the top) instead.
The market is saturated.
A) Making data "Better" makes these over the top services better. If my data is more stable I will more likely make a call using whatsapp, and the telco looses the money from voice. - why would they do this?
B) 5G requires completely new infrastructure, from aerials to core packet switched. This costs a lot of money, again, why would they do this?
Reasoning: The ITU defined the whole NFV thing, and how to do it. You need a certified platform, cloud orchestrator, a whole load of systems to do NFV. The move to NFV is very similar to how x86 went from bare metal in the data center to hypervisors. It is an absolutely massive change. The telcos have never virtualised their machines, and can only start doing it now (in the last 2 years)
This is why the telcos took on/over openstack as a concern. I think they thought the could run openstack clouds and run their NFVs (this is what telcos call their VMs) for way less money than the hardware boxes.
Of course, reality came home, and rolling your own is hard. And the NFV providers still charged a fortune, and so did the system integrators.
So again, we are at a point that this costs a load of money for the telco. Why do it?
Benefit one is that they can now roll out new functions in a relatively short amount of time (magic of virtualisation and all that). And by short I mean I have seen a national VoLTE roll out in a few weeks.
And I though, that's great, but me, as a consumer, am I going to pay extra for VoLTE? Nah. 4G is good enough for me. And considering the cost to the telcos... something doesn't add up. As far as I can see, they simply can't add on enough consumer fluff to pay for what is a massive investment.
The only answer I can see, the only untapped market, is IOT. And my only example is some car company made a deal with some big US telco to do all of their car originating data, and I think that is where the telcos will make their money.
But again, I am coming from the software side. 5G to me isn't about radio or and of that, it is about telcos moving their compute to the edge, and virtualising their entire infrastructure to allow them to roll out new services in weeks instead of years. And I am at least a year out of date ;)
edit: For what it's worth, I found this paragraph from the FCC last year: https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2018-14806/p-20 It sounds like they're saying "we don't know if this will be a problem yet, but be prepared to limit emissions in 23.6-24ghz range because we might require it at some point".
Also, paragraph 9 of the same document has the actual band limits (with a special requirement) if anybody is interested:
> The 24 GHz band consists of two band segments: The lower segment, from 24.25-24.45 GHz, and the upper segment, from 24.75-25.25 GHz
> any mobile or transportable equipment capable of operating in any portion of the 24 GHz band must be capable of operating at all frequencies within the 24 GHz band, in both band segments
Not the best analysis but I'm working. Basically like any other metric, as the frequency increases the space between peaks and valleys decreases and it becomes harder to determine/separate from others 30hz to 230hz is much easier to tell the difference than 15khz to 15.2khz if you want to listen to audio tones. Once you get to microwaves this becomes of course much more difficult.
http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=24687&seqNum...
> 30hz to 230hz is much easier to tell the difference than 15khz to 15.2khz if you want to listen to audio tones
That's definitely true for humans, but I don't think it necessarily applies to radio signals in general (though it does make sense at first glance).
The way most of these signals are being generated is through an "information signal" (usually referred to as a modulator) being created within your device, then moved up in frequency by combining it with a "carrier signal". This separation allows the information signal's properties (such as bandwidth, modulation scheme, bitrate/Hz, etc...) to be more-or-less independent from the physical characteristics of propagation, which will be more strongly related to the carrier signal's properties (e.g. water absorption, reflection/transmission off of/through materials, etc...).
However, no process is perfect, and although we would like to generate perfect signals, we can't. Distortion appears in multiple parts of this pipeline, both in the generation of the low-frequency modulator and the high-frequency carrier. Distortion typically comes from "linear" components not being perfectly linear and thereby generating harmonics of the signal passing through them. In the case of the modulator, this splatters signal energy up and down the spectrum on the order of the bandwidth of the modulator, but in the case of the carrier it does so on the order of the carrier frequency. This is all a matter of degree and depending on the application may not be that big a deal, but it definitely must be addressed for high-density communications equipment like cell networks.
All transmitters have filters at multiple stages of their signal processing chains, both lowpass filters that filter the modulator before it's mixed with the carrier signal to boost it up in frequency, as well as bandpass filters that ensure the output stays within the bounds it's meant to be; but these filters only do so much and they can be expensive to create (as they can have rather fine physical tolerances) so everybody is always just playing the "do the best job we can for the least money" game.
Luckily, most transmitters are also connected to antennae that provide a convenient filtering on the output (they only resonate at the frequencies they transmit at) which helps for specialized systems that only operate at a single transmit frequency, but for something like 5G is less helpful, due to the many channels it supports, causing the antenna to necessarily support a wide range of frequencies.
Bur for 99% of the cases, why would we need it?
IoT doesn't need 5G, it needs LiRa.
Streaming applications, I can stream with 4G.
50 ms latency with 4G, so what. Except for competitive multiplayer gaming perhaps, I don't see the issue. But I think they want everything wired ;)
Industrial applications, outside of IoT? Give me a valid example that needs countrywide coverage.
I hardly notice difference with 4G and my WiFi. Increase coverage for 4G, before implementing 5G.
Fyi: 4G offers maximum real-world download speeds up to 60Mbps. Currently, that is more than enough.
Police CAD systems, streaming video from body cameras, oil well monitoring.
Just because you can't imagine an application of 5G for your consumer needs doesn't mean it isn't needed.
Why would a CAD system need > 60 Mbps? Why would it even need more than 30 kbs? I doubt it would need more than a MQTT channel and an app.
- streaming video from body cameras
Low quality over 4G and store the video in HD. Syncing on secure access-points ( the devices need to charge, sync there) Nothing more is required, since body cams are used as evidence. Also, live stream body cams already exist over 4G ( 1920 x 1080, 30FPS)
- oil well monitoring
IoT... Jeez...
> Just because you can't imagine an application of 5G for your consumer needs doesn't mean it isn't needed.
Like i said. You want more and faster. I already mentioned some applications, that also don't require it.
Just like your examples, also don't require it.
Again, human fallacy and you are providing excellent examples. Thanks.
Ajit Pai strikes again!
I would be much more happy to have reliable 4G or 3G at least, first.
I suppose quite some support comes from people who have connection issues with weak 4G and assumes 5G will solve them.
But since 5G will consume apparently 3G towers and has much less range, quite the opposite could happen. Even less connection for people not in the city.
if neurons were directly exposed they would heat up and their firing rate would be altered significantly [look at fig2 / D ] ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4233276/ )
this study did a direct exposure testing on a human's arm (and on rats and monkeys) at 94GHz for 3s at 1W/cm^2: https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a628296.pdf
this did 24h low power 1mW/cm^2 exposure of human eye like cells and detected no significant difference in micronucleus expression, DNA strand breaks, and heat stress protein expression: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4997488/
this used 42GHz on rats for 30min/day for 3 days, and tried to look for tumors/cancer and found no significant difference: https://www.rrjournal.org/doi/abs/10.1667/RR3121
so. it seems there's no immediate and known adverse effect (other than the heating and maybe some interference with the electro-biochemistry of cells, particularly with neurons).
and luckily people usually don't use phones near their heads anymore (when doing large data transfers), so we don't really have to worry about concentrated absorption on the head due to being at best a centimeter from the emitter.
> Also, what is the canonical source on 5g spectrum and power levels?
maximum permissible exposure is defined as 10W/m^2 power density (for 6GHz between 100GHz) by the FCC.
[1]: https://www.cablefree.net/wirelesstechnology/4glte/5g-freque...
That being said it is more technically difficult to go "up" in frequency. Lower frequencies have less bandwidth, but are easier to generate, can go through physical objects better and for longer distances.
This fight to me looks like the industry wants to use a cheaper frequency that meets their minimum technical goals (in terms of development costs not necessarily licensing costs) science and other applications be damned.
This phenomenon is called adjacent-channel interference and violations can and would be enforced by the FCC. The challenge isn't detection or enforcement, it's the challenge of the different government agencies to balance the people's needs properly.
FCC wants to auction off the spectrum to benefit telcos and their customers. NOAA wants to protect people with accurate predictions of hazardous weather. Your question presumes that the weather prediction function is more valuable, but the government may not reach that same conclusion.
But these very sensitive weather sensors. And they already work by detecting a trend and then detecting a big blip over that. (So rain currently looks like some sort of interesting blip in the noise.) So, it might be possible to have cities mapped with a differing trend, but it would further complicate models. And currently over land there's not much noise, because humans don't use this part of the EM spectrum. Mostly because it's not great at long range, because attenuates very fast exactly due to water vapor in the air. So it was "easy" to exploit this for getting weather data, because it was reasonable to assume close to constant natural emissions. (Probably only a simple daily and seasonal trend. Though it might be already necessary to handle differences between woodlands and urban areas.)
(See also, why it's hard to do the same over water: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/252663726_The_Effec... )
I'm not sure if it will result in dramatically more bandwidth though.
That's not to suggest that you cannot find a way to discriminate between the water vapor and the 5G transmissions, but you can't just take a sample on a low-humidity day and subtract that from new samples. If the metrics are below the new noise floor, merely throwing machine learning at the problem will not solve it.
We get Water vapour readings (which feed into our weather forecasting models) from the ~24ghz range which 5G is going to blast away.
I'm betting that when all is said and done, the cell phones will help the weather forecast more than hurt it - but this may take some years if the cell companies are too greedy about it.
I'm working on detecting weather using all kinds of phone sensors like barometers and cameras in All Clear if you're interested: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.allclearwe...
and the open source sensor package: https://github.com/JacobSheehy/AllClearSensorLibrary
And I do agree that other instruments are required for a complete picture of the weather, not just phones! But a remarkable amount can be done from phones. GPS attenuation for example, can also be read from some Android phones and can inform about high-altitude conditions.
Fuck planes amirite?
Planes and aviation could have major assistance in planning and adjusting to weather events if a phone network were actively in use as well.
Last second info re: waiting for planes to take off due to weather delays is one of my primary frustrations. It hurts a lot of people and companies to have last-second changes to forecasts and I would like to reduce that pain point by providing further advance notice of likelihood of severe weather in an area. This can be done (partially) with phone sensors.
Truly we live in the best of all possible worlds.
Phones together with satellites and radars and weather stations will produce a better weather forecast experience than we have today, without using phones.
Thanks for the Candide reference, that is one of my favourite books, but I do not think it really applies to my optimism about weather forecasting technology into the future. We currently live in the worst of worlds when it comes to stability of plans for improvements into our weather infrastructure (at least in the US).
That will surely depend on how much the satellites sensing ability is degraded, no? What makes you so sure, other than a commitment to optimism?
The part I'm working on currently is a privacy-aware implementation of recording useful signal strength from user's phones, that could be used for this.
I think that its really interesting that water is literally the reason why life exists on this planet. Basically, water has shielded life from radiation from space, (in addition to the magnetosphere, etc) -- but life was able to evolve in the protective layer of water.
So, I just find the fact that propagating radiation measurement through water, such as you describe, and as it relates to the potential health concerns of Humans creating a new, fairly powerful and ubiquitous source of radiation (5G) to be something we really need to pay attention to.