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Comment by zw123456 | Hacker News Reader

One thing that a lot of people do not understand is that 5G can operate in any frequency band. In fact, for many 4G radios it is nothing more than a software upgrade, no change to the physical device or power levels, just faster and lower throughput.

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The fact that the general public doesn't know this is a failure of the carriers and FCC. Instead of clearly stating what the differences are and maybe not putting everything in the 5G bucket they got greedy and thought they could get it all.

If the high frequency set was left out of 5Gs first round no one would have objected to the upgrade.

I find the "We need 5G so we can have real time translation and autonomous cars" one of the dumbest arguments that can be made and it's pandering to an uneducated public. Why do we need more speed and connectivity for those things when we have better and better ML processors on Teslas and Google moving some voice recognition algos directly to devices? It's a bullshit argument.

I suspect the clear presentation of facts on 5G would not have mattered. At all. In fact it could have had an opposite effect, merely by increasing visibility of the "topic".

Well, technically there may be a middle market for remote human controlled cars where a live video stream is necessary.

This title summarizes it - https://boingboing.net/2019/04/10/ai-8k-5g-ecosystem.html ; after falling back on their promise of building a TV factory in Wisconsin, Foxconn said the would be instead doing “AI 8k 5G” the online buzzword missing was blockchain.

> If the high frequency set was left out of 5Gs first round no one would have objected to the upgrade.

There's a subset that will object to anything involving radio because it's electro-magnetic RADIATION and RADIATION causes cancer!

Can we convince these people that sound is phononic RADIATION and they should therefore stop talking?

one of the major reasons that so called mm-wave is far safer than previous low/ mid-band (i.e. < 6GHz) technologies is the following.mm-wave frequencies (e.g. 28Ghz) allow the use of array antennas (i.e. Phased Array Antennas, PAA's). The reason this is so much safer is because the PAA's produce "pencil width beams" that is, the beams are very narrow. Rather than blasting away in all directions like the sub-6Ghz bands, the beam is focused on the PAA antenna. Why is this safer? because, if something, like, let's say a human, comes in between the transmitter and the receiver, the signal will be completely lost. Hence, at this point the PAA controller will stop transmitting or scanning in that direction. So there is no radiation in that direction. So, if you are worried about it, just turn off mm-wave capability (e.g. turn off 5G UWB). But honestly, you don't have to worry, the beam (and energy) is very focused, if anything comes in the way, even a wet piece of paper, or a person, it stops. This means that mm-wave is far safer than previous 4G in the mid to low bands. 5G in the mid to low bands are basically the same as 4G but have a much more efficient use of the spectrum. So overall, 5G is faster, lower latency and safer than 4G or 3G or anything that came before. Of course there is a lot of misinformation from various propaganda sources that want to confuse the public.

We cannot rely on devices always cutting communication when something goes in between. Do you trust all Chinese manufacturers to correctly implement such features? If 5g was a 5mW laser beam that would cut out on interference, would you trust it always working?

Mm waves may not be harmful to humans but there are some studies that show retinal damage in mice at certain frequencies. Until at least some studies on humans have been done we should not all jump into this like nothing can go wrong and it's guaranteed safe because communication is cut automatically on interference.

oops, I meant to saw lower latency and higher throughput.

_Lower_ throughput? Care to elaborate?

I think he was referring to 4G having lower throughout.

Saying 4G->5G for most modems is just a software upgrade for most modems is not quite accurate. The RF hardware itself is generally not a full SDR. There are predefined RF paths tuned for the bands in 4G/5G. So it’s a little more than a software upgrade. Theoretically this is possible but I think companies like Qualcomm are too worried about pushing their new hardware instead of software. I do think it should move in this direction and it would benefit companies like Qualcomm to do this by selling software updates.

I expect it was meant to say "lower-latency throughput".

Yes sorry Lower Latency and higher throughput.

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