Opponents are uncomfortable with the enthusiasm of the telecom companies over 5G without sufficient (they feel) long-term research on the health effects of saturating entire neighborhoods with millimeter-wave radiation 24/7. Residents of these areas will be exposed to this radiation whether they use it or not - there is no opt-out.
There is some quackery in this space (i.e. cures for "radiation sickness," etc.), but I don't consider it blameworthy to have caution concerning new technology in general, especially when the benefits of 5G to the consumer are so dubious. It seems to me like a push by the telecoms to re-implement wireless internet on their terms from the ground up in as many areas as they can before public opinion forces neutrality back on them again.
I also don't think they'll actually succeed (at least in America anyway), but mostly end up selling people the same product under the label "5G LTE" or something.
In the mmwave range transmitters will not have to transmit higher power levels. First because the use-case for this range is when there is NO obstacles to go through (it does not really work otherwise...), in short distance situations, and then also because beam forming will always be used.
> especially when the benefits of 5G to the consumer are so dubious
Benefits are not limited to browsing speed on your smartphone.
5G is designed to be able to handle massive number of connected devices (e.g. IoT), very low latency (e.g. self-driving cars, industrial control), and very high reliability (industrial control, etc)
So, on the one hand, 5G is going to make unicorns fly down and carry us to the heavens on wings of pure data, and on the other hand, it can't go through walls...?
Research shows that two thirds of consumers are not willing to pay even $1 more for 5G internet. [0] Regardless of the promises companies are making to each other and consumers today, the demand for 5G just doesn't seem consumer-driven.
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[0] https://www.pwc.com/us/en/services/consulting/library/consum...
As already written in my previous comment, 5G is not just about faster internet. Other use-cases are as important, if not more. Operators know they can't charge consumers extra.
You can put a mmwave basestation in a factory (a couple of cells near the ceiling) and controll everything (machines, "robots", transporters, forklifts, inventory,...) via LTE.
1) 5G improves wireless internet - though it only works over short-range and can't go through walls.
2) 5G needs a massive deployment of new devices to reach consumers - though most consumers are not willing to pay even $1 more for 5G.
3) 5G is a prerequisite for amazing new tech like IoT and self-driving cars - many of which already exist and will continue to use existing 3G and 4G bands.
"Dubious" is actually me being generous!
5G reuses existing 3G and 4G frequencies, but with better rf management (among other things). The mmwave frequencies are to address mass-crowd scenarios, which currently today already cause 4G DAS deployments to almost burst at the seams.
These are not "my" opinions. These are the current state of affairs re RF management and planning.
Telcos are blowing $26 billion on this new tech, so I think it's important to question how they're going to make that money back. If you read how the industry itself answers this question, hint: it's not self-driving cars. It is 5G network slicing. The current wireless infrastructure is built on net neutrality, so they cannot differentiate traffic without rebuilding it all from scratch. That is the real reason behind the $26 billion rollout and millions of new devices. They need to rebuild the internet to charge enterprise customers high prices and 5G is just how they decided to market this project to the public. They need to do this before the political environment changes or else they lose their opportunity.
That sounds like marketing hype from an ISP.
A self-driving car that is dependent on a radio network to operate is by defonition, not self-driving.
This means less interference to others around, and higher capacity.
5G is safer than previous tech (3-5 orders safer than radio that has been around for something like 2 centuries).
This fact has nothing to do with 5G. It is physics. A high-frequency carrier is not able to penetrate objects as well as it does with a lower frequency.
Other anticipated benefits are providing connectivity to fast vehicles (for example high speed trains) and providing mobile internet to whole buildings in situations where it's cheaper or more convenient than fiber optics or copper.
Wavelength not so much. From 700MHz to 5 GHz everything is in use. Now 3.4GHz (main 5G frequency) is right inbetween. Nearly noone is trying to build 5G networks with the high frequencies starting from 24GHz because you have a) no range and b) line of sight is preferred.
See also: 53GHz has some anti-microbial effects when combined with antibiotics: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265134435_The_Enhan...
Interestingly the antibiotic resistance is only seen in one particular number on a graph, whereas the other numbers show that EMF seems "beneficial" as it is slowing bacterial growth. Naturally the question is, what happens if you throw human tissue in the mix too.
The lack of consistency in results is definitely an issue, and it's true that it may be turn out to be a net benefit overall, which is why I believe we still don't have a clear understanding of the situation. Considering that bacteria adapt to their environment, we may see further unpredictable effects. The risk as I see it is not knowing how it may turn out before deploying it on a massive scale.
Exposing skin to the sun is known radiation hazard. If you go outside during daytime why worry about 5G?
So 70% of the energy is absorbed by the skin. What does that much energy at those freqs do to the epidermis? I don't know, you don't know. I'm not saying you're making a case for the conspiracy theories, but you're certainly not making one against them.
> If you go outside during daytime why worry about 5G?
If you go outside during daytime on an Australian summer day without sunscreen including underneath your clothing, you're going to get severe sunburn and permanently increase your chance of skin cancer in under 15 minutes. We have public awareness campaigns about this on TV and everything. Not a great comparison.
I have no idea whether 5g freq ranges and power have health impacts, I'm just saying that clearly you don't either.
You could repeat everything you said for 2.450 MHz and sound plausible, except that's the frequency of microwave ovens that cook things including humans. Do any molecules resonate at 5g freqs? I have no idea, neither do you.
The impact on tissue is still thermal.. and the power flux densities of 5G are small compared to the sun, especially so because RF bandwidths are tiny compared to the blackbody radiation spectrum of the sun.
You would have to show why these RF transmissions are more pathological than the random process EM waves generated by solar blackbody. If you look at a modern cellular OFDM waveform, it is almost statistically indistinguishable from broadband noise. It had the same Peak to average power ratio, the same flat spectral bandwidths, and the same affinity to causing resonances--its just much much lower in amplitude than solar.
The wavelength of microwave ovens is even longer, at 6.66cm. And yet that's the rotational resonant frequency of water. Weird, huh? By the way, you can confirm this with a single slice of cheese with the turnplate removed and then calculate the speed of light from the burn marks on that cheese being 3.33cm apart :)
The only question is whether that reaction at any given frequency has any impact on the larger system those molecules are part of.
The answer is scientists aren't sure because they haven't had a chance to experiment much, and you and I are sure as shit not qualified to comment on it.
I'm not going to don a tinfoil hat over 5g rollouts, but this cavalier attitude of just expecting everything to be fine without any meaningful testing is just as bad if not worse than the conspiracy theories.
EDIT: the reason it cooks food is the intensity of the field strength (1 kilowatt per cubic ft, or ~27,000 watts per cubic meter) in a microwave oven. 5G signals are tens of microwatts (millionths of a watt) per cubic meter. That's a difference of a factor of 10's of billions.
power from your phone: 0.2 watt in case of LTE.
reveived power from a basestation: around -40 to -120 dbm.
You are 100% sure that will have absolutely no impact on insects or birds in close proximity to it?
But even if it would be 500W, no haven't heared of it. Which does not mean that it could happen. But then again the question was not a) insects or birds or b) close proximity (which is what, close then 1m?)
Not really. 2.4GHz was chosen because it allowed to built microwave ovens at that particular size and because nobody cares about the 2.4GHz range. You can build 900 MHz ovens too, there are some, mainly for industrial usage.
But all of the interaction is thermal, not ionizing. And the energy levels are so tiny that the thermal impact is much less than the thermal impact of opening or closing a window on a warm day.
Microwave ovens have thermal interactions with the food inside them, because the microwave runs at tens of thousands of times higher power than is used for radio frequency signaling.
2.4 GHz WiFi isn’t microwaving our bodies, and neither will 5G.
We know that magnetic fields alone have very apparent interactions with humans and other living organisms[1].
The only mitigating factor here is the TRP, but at the FCC limit of 500 watts ERP per channel, that's actually not too far off from microwave ovens. I doubt it'll hurt humans unless they happen to live in the immediate path of an eNodeB, but I don't think either one of us is qualified to speculate about what it'll do to inspects and birds that will pass much closer to it.
Your wifi router isn't cooking you because it's at a significantly lower ERP than a microwave oven, but the same is not true for a mobile cell.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_magnetic_stimulat...
But the induced magnetic fields from this level of power, dispersed at an inverse square rate, which isn’t penetrating far past the skin, just doesn’t seem reasonable to fear.
It's mostly dead cells, so not much.
Nope, we know for certain it doesn't immediately cause irrepairable negative health damage that can be observed in a lab setting because this would have already been tested.
The vastly different is a marketing term.
The problem is that most of the industry, when they think of 5G, just want to send as many 4k streams as possible everywhere.
5G is not a vastly different technology. There are some very novel tricks under the hood, but it's still just fancy radios.
source?
I thought TMS can do that, after all it can do the reverse: https://neurosciencenews.com/memory-loss-reversed-tms-12006/
There are some adverse effects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_magnetic_stimulat...
One of the tougher individual questions are 'how should one deal in societal stances one doesn't personally agree with, but tacitly relies upon society at large to in fact take those disagreeable stances?' war, defense, vaccines, GMO's, wireless communications.
I call these the "you need me on that wall" things.
(I haven't seen any credible study saying it actually increases cancer risk, but from first principles, 5G increasing cancer risk, particularly skin cancer risk, doesn't seem all that absurd, similar to how sunlight increases cancer risk)
Now with 5G towers and their much shorter range people are finding these all over the place, in cities on nearly every block and thus many more people are much closer to the towers than before.
so worry when it's too late?
Maybe we all could benefit from being a little more paranoid.
Furthermore the end goal is natural convergence with WiFi. The telcos already are pushing Ethernet more and more (backhaul and fronthaul), of course over fibre (because bandwidth requirements, and timing has to be calibrated to microseconds because radio symbols are being encapsulated in Ethernet).
MP-TCP has been recently merged to the kernel, it was already enabled on a lot of phones.
What's missing are ways to allow hosting secure hybrid-cells/APs so telcos are able and willing to offload traffic.
EU environment minister Céline Fremault: "The people of Brussels are not guinea pigs whose health I can sell at a profit. We cannot leave anything to doubt.”
https://www.fiercewireless.com/5g/brussels-halts-5g-plans-ov...