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Comment by ducttape12 | Hacker News Reader

I haven't much looked into 5G. Considering that 95% of the time I'm on WiFi anyway, I really don't get this push for faster and faster mobile speeds. (especially if there's potential to damage wildlife and us with it)

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If it's going to harm wildlife, the technology should be forbidden, without qualification or exception.

If not, I don't feel the need for faster speeds than what I get, but I would be very interested in getting more data per month at the same (or lower) monthly price. If a cellular provider could give me internet connectivity (LTE speeds) at a price of something like $1 per gigabyte I would drop my household's cable service in favor of that right away.

By that logic, we shouldn’t build cities or buildings. I am pretty sure most people do not agree with this position.

Not quite.

Cities and buildings provide tremendous benefits. These benefits, presumably, outweigh the costs of harming wildlife to construct them.

The OP is arguing that the benefits of 5G are objectively minor and therefore not worth the cost of causing mass harm to a broad swath of wildlife.

I agree with the OP's position -- I will gladly keep my ~50Mbit 4G speeds if it means we will prevent the collapse of various insect populations.

Yeah, I feel that "without qualification or exception" is not a tenable position. We harm wildlife all the time: ideally, we don't excessively harm wildlife (where "excessive" is a constantly evolving standard).

You're right, I articulated my position extremely poorly. The needs of people and civilization should often win out over the needs of wildlife. But almost always in a way that sacrifices only wildlife within a confined spatial region and almost never in a way that threatens an entire species.

If there are species living around the globe that might not be able to continue their current role in the global ecosystem in a world where 5G is pervasive, then we should not allow the use of 5G in the vast majority of the world. The consequences, for humans, via trophic cascade or whatever, would be extremely uncertain. Are the benefits of 5G really compelling enough to brave them? Certainly they are not compelling enough to me.

A very large part of it is Marketing people dying to have something new to sell people. LTE has reached market saturation, so 5G is the only thing they can use to sell people new phones and new data plans. They don’t care that they have setup this perverse system where they sell people on faster speeds, but then add data caps to deter them from using it.

A less sinister take might be that faster speeds allow each device to get off the air faster, enabling more devices to be used in the same area. But that’s mostly a technical solution and I highly doubt the advantages rise to the level that the Business side has started pushing it. Salespeople just see the commissions.

> "Marketing people dying to have something new to sell people"

Not just marketing people. Everyone at companies making the equipment (Ericsson, Nokia, Huawei), the chipsets (Qualcomm), and rolling out the networks (e.g., AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint) wants a piece of the pie.

Given that 5Ghz wifi barely goes through walls I couldn't believe when I read 5G was being tested on mm wave (24 to 86Ghz). Seems to me the point of it is to install a transceiver on every light pole to have higher resolution surveillance.

Like you, I never feel needing more with a good LTE connection. It's faster than I've ever needed.

Having said that, the promise of 5G is that it brings such an enormous bandwidth from a frequency perspective that it literally could be a broadly distributed very high speed connection technology for fixed locations. Purportedly one of the reasons Google abandoned their fiber project was that ultra-high speed for huge numbers of users with 5G would make fixed infrastructure for the last mile redundant. We'll see.

I'll take actually getting LTE speeds consistently (and getting the advertised speeds from my ISP) over a move to 5g any day.

It’s not for faster speeds for individual users. It’s for maintaining reasonable speeds for when everyone’s default mode of communication is real-time wireless 4k video streaming; that is to say, preserving the current level of service for early adopters as our usage patterns become mainstream (and thus consume 5-10x more bandwidth in aggregate).

Also, things load pretty slow right now.

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