The European Union has been talking about digitisation and green new deal for economic recovery, but investing in 5G means spending a lot of materials on both stations and mobile phones. It can also mean an increase in energy consumption for both stations and mobile phones.
It seems to me that the two objectives may conflict with each other.
Edit: Facepalm!
I know there are other things that consume more energy, but this is indicative of Jevons' paradox. When we have the choice between efficiency and productivity we choose the second. We could be replacing 4G technology with one with the same speed but less energy consumption, but that would never make economic sense.
In my opinion resource efficiency is not an irrelevant goal but a goal contrary to this society. We must always consume more because otherwise there is no growth. Without that there is no creation of jobs and profits.
The goals of the economy are opposite to those of ecology. The first is to produce as much as possible. It is no wonder that carbon emissions have only actually been reduced when there has been an economic decline.
Now we are going to revitalise the economy with the green new deal, but if it is really efficient it will not generate profits or jobs. So it will only make the situation worse. I think 5G is another desperate measure to maintain this infinite growth in a world of finite resources.
If you’re worried about energy inefficiency, the best things to focus on are probably domestic insulation and reducing car usage. People tend to get hung up on the small stuff.
It’s really bizarre to me that THIS is the aspect of consumerism that people go after for energy use. Improved access to the internet has substantial benefits to society; a little energy use is acceptable. SUVs and 5000sqft houses have no obvious benefit to society at all, and use vastly more energy than the telecoms industry could dream of using.
It's more common than you think. In fact it's so common that it has it's own Wikipedia page(s): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality
Personally I don't have a car and I don't fly. I live in an area that has a climate that allows me not to spend too much on air conditioning (I don't have air conditioning), but again that's not the point [1].
We currently spend 5.6 billion tons of materials on communication equipment 5.6% of all our consumption [2]. These are not figures that we can ignore, especially since in my opinion it is one of the areas that we least need to spend.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism [2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/22/worlds-c...
Of course, if we had been optimising society purely for energy usage from the start, no-one would live in rural areas anyway. But that's not the world we have.
I'm not really familiar with 5G technology, but I have an idea that the stations had less range than 4G although they are faster. If that were the case maybe there would be other better ways to give good network to the rural environment
No, that's not correct.
Most countries are looking at 5G on three separate bands. Usually something in the 700MHz area (for use in rural areas, similar range to the longest-range LTE), something in the 2.5GHz area (for use in urban areas, similar range to current shorter range LTE), and ~30GHz (very short range, dense urban areas only).
Getting less popular now that tankless gas and electric heating is a thing, but they're historically pretty common in some countries. They're more efficient than electric tank water heating approaches, and arguably more efficient than gas tanked systems, sometimes (usual caveats for comparing gas and electric heating apply).
A major downside is that you typically can't have more than one, or at _most_ two, in one home. Some installations have a scary setup where there are two or more of them, but only one will operate at a time.
Major improvement is latency, which not only enhances existing application experience significantly, makes development easier by removing lots of concern, but it also enables completely new tech that has been stopped because of the latency profile of earlier tech.
What you're propably thinking of is the smallest use case like a webpage (which can still significantly be sped up) or a video. But have you though about loading several GiB sized app for just product demonstration purposes on the fly? The things fast connections enable can be hard to even imagine. You could have an entire VR/AR experience where-ever you are
Increasing the speed of the hardware can bring advances but it can also exacerbate the problems that we are already feeling with this hyperconnectivity.
Needless to say that ecologists see the 5G deployment as utter madness, especially since, in their view, 4G is good enough.
It's impossible to see all the future exploits the new technology allows. All the things we do are built upon other existing ideas, moving to higher speed, lower latency connection is another step in progress.
Think about being able to download several GiB application on the fly just to view a demo for a house, or get the schematics for what you're viewing in realtime with AR
I would bet that 5G has cut down base stations which operate similarly to 4G, but the option to not use a new generation only works for maybe 1 generation before it gets too far behind. Data consumption is still going up after all, and some countries (such as Australia) have already mandated the shutdown of older generations, with 2G switched off to refarm spectrum, and 3G scheduled for switch off.
More and more of the use cases move away from providing higher data rates to smartphones, so yes, oone could argue that 4G is currently good enough for that specific use case, but that's just one among many.
5G is about supporting greater capacity in general (so maybe the same rate as 4G but to more users at the same time, which is important in dense areas), massive IOT, extremely short latency, high reliability. These are important use cases but they are mostly off the radar of the average person.
You know kinda like they do for new medicines.
We should focus on how not to get into this paradox.
More energy... greater carbon footprint... faster climate change.