5G and Shannon’s Law
waveform.com
waveform.com
I wonder: Would even the most ambitious of telecommunications researchers in 1990 have thought it likely that in 2020 we’d be rolling out gigabit wireless speeds to handheld devices over nation-spanning networks?
The scaling of Moore’s Law was clear by then, and certainly fiber optics represented a practical path to near-unlimited wired bandwidth. What were the radio folks thinking at the time?
The main benefit of cellular is when you're away from WiFi. But unless you're constantly traveling to places without WiFi, you get that from a $20/month plan and the existing cellular network.
Also helps when FRBNY in conjunction with the Tresury dept via state street and blackrock is buying their HY bonds (TMUS US87264AAT25 [Ba3], S US85207UAK16 [B1], CTL US156700BC99 [Ba3], LVLT US527298BF96 [Ba3], VOD US92857WBQ24 [Ba1] for just a few examples, all trading way over par) on you, the taxpayers behalf, on leverage, in the secondary market and thus helping to lower their ongoing borrowing costs.
No gross mis-allocation of resources or moral hazards as far as one eyes can see… surely the companies will use these funds much better this time for capex… lol
Perhaps if VC's funded many more things to the same notional as the uncollaterized debt extended globally (not "valuations", not re extending to the same companies after previous funding from the same one), I would agree to degree , if they faced 100% loss of value extended if the endeavors they funded didn't pan out (not considering firesales of assets that may have been used in such endeavors during the bankruptcy/liquidation process).
* The higher data density of 5G per spectrum allows you to just upgrade towers instead of having to place more dense towers with 4G. This is the "5G is cheaper" point as it allows you to avoid having to build more towers.
* Due to the increase in data demand in some few places places, you'll have to place 5G towers very densely to meet it, more densely than in the age of 4G. Not because of the technology just because it's now a different era where demand has increased even more.
So this seems like only a theoretical possibility since in practice they'll just have faster towers instead of fewer of them.
> Due to the increase in data demand in some few places places, you'll have to place 5G towers very densely to meet it, more densely than in the age of 4G. Not because of the technology just because it's now a different era where demand has increased even more.
For millimeter wave it is because of the technology. Those frequencies don't penetrate as well so regardless of how many users there are or how much bandwidth they're using, the towers have to be closer to the devices which means you need more of them.
With constant demand, you can service a higher amount of people with the same tower density thanks to 5G. If the number of customers is increasing, it means you get more money but you only have to upgrade the towers instead of having to put them more densely. That's how it's cheaper.
> For millimeter wave it is because of the technology.
Good point.
Not to mention the security implications from both angles. As an end user do you want random cell phone traffic egressing through your network. And that easily opens up the network to cell site spoofing moreso than they already are.
A big reason LTE, GSM, evdo etc were successfull was because the full stack, from the backbone to endpoint/user was managed by the carrier.
Offloading that to home users who actively put routers in between interference sources like windows, fridges, washers/dryers and then tey and extend their signal with repeaters is a questionable goal at best.
Why? You could easily enforce a policy that only who use your fiber network at home qualify for these femtocells. Considering that majority of backbone fiber is an oligopoly already, this wouldn't be an issue.
> Most users home routers are garbage for latency and loss sensitive applications, of which voice would qualify.
Do you have any source on this claim? IP network has become just as fast and resiliant as the pure teleco network (reason why 5G is based on IP in the first place). IP calls from Facetime, Google Duo, Skype, Zoom, Whatsapp and others work just as good as regular calls if you have decent coverage. And you can easily implement QoS for calls through your own network, which is what the old 3G/4G tech was already doing.
> And that easily opens up the network to cell site spoofing moreso than they already are
How common is WiFi spoofing in your experience?
> A big reason LTE, GSM, evdo etc were successfull was because the full stack, from the backbone to endpoint/user was managed by the carrier
The reason they had to do that was because IP stack wasn't good enough 2 decades or even a decade ago. Unless you are in a 3rd world country, IP network is just as good as 3G/4G stack today.
> Offloading that to home users who actively put routers in between interference sources like windows, fridges, washers/dryers and then tey and extend their signal with repeaters is a questionable goal at best.
Okay, you might want to revisit that thought couple of years from now :)
There are limited markets where verizon or att offer both broadband and cell service.
And the other big cell carriers don’t have a broadband market.
To your other point. Most gpon modems are arris or some other brand all in ones these days that carry voip converters/cable television and then normal tcpip traffic. They are bought to maximize profits and rental fees and not with packet forwarding in mind. There are acceptable levels of loss and latency on residential networks that don’t generally carry over to campus or business services.
Add in they also run dns, dhcp and firewalling and often some “extra” parental controls and sometimes a vlan for guest access.
It’s not the residnetial customers fault for the placement either. But most demarcs for telco and internet, even in new construction is in a utility room that is generally right next to other utilities. At least in single family homes.
In apartments sure they may be better placed but still often next to the air handler. And give. The range of 5g, the first floor or two is all that matters.
[1]the biggest difference of 4G over WiFi is concentrated coordination , but this could be achieved for Wi-Fi too.
Edit: apparently 5G does not use UWB
Think video delivery kiosk - I'd like to rent a movie please or I'd like today's daily news videos/VR. Downloaded in 3 secs from a vending machine?
It's not just the bandwidth. UWB has a peak power density limit of −41.3 dBm/MHz. 5G is 55 dBm.
Note the many, many, many orders of magnitude difference...
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/4/18295310/amazon-project-ku...
Seamless access/mobility and accessibility to maritime, airline, remote satellite phones etc is one of the ways 5G is hoping to sell 'access anywhere' and diversify from just mobile.
Most NTN access is via a terrestrial satellite basestation acting as a gateway into the mobile networks.
I think one day the communication 'transport' will be a worldwide mesh and operator profitability will be solely about business services on top of that.
Already seeing that to some extent with multiple operators sharing towers, radio front haul and spectrum. At the moment its early days of course.
The point is that as more services migrate to higher bands or more spectrum is made available (TV spectrum partially reallocated, 3G is sunset), there is more capacity available for rural locations that need that lower band.
Lots of work on alternatives to fibre for those last few miles e.g. dedicated wireless links to local distribution nodes in villages.
I have a 90 sqm two storey house with a detached garage, workshop and quite a bit of land around it and I need 6 WiFi routers to get a signal everywhere, and even then it's spotty and slow.
Sometimes makes me wish I just had a data SIM on all devices and be done with it.
Open source 4g/5G stuff that was posted a while ago looks really nice, but apparently it would be illegal to operate :/
>The main benefit of cellular is when you're away from WiFi.
For you maybe.
The billions you mention are a result of government auctioning, it doesn't mean anything to users besides added cost.
5G aims to allow for completely new applications that were not possible before, and hoping that's where the money will come from. Ultra-reliable and low latency, and massive machine type communications are two new areas 5G is pushing into. The first will allow applications like self driving cars, remote control with immediate feedback, and combined with the increased speeds, augmented and virtual reality. The second area is for the smart city/home type of applications.
This is all from my digital communications professor with ties to Ericsson, but on a personal note I'd be hype to explore distant places in real time by wearing a vr headset and controlling a drone with a 360° camera and <10ms latency. You could be anywhere in the world and actually interact with the environment with just a 5G enabled headset and a 5G-drone renting app. Racing through an abandoned mall! Drone laser tag in a redwood forest!
A blurb like this can be found everywhere where 5G is talked about. It sounds technical and knowledgeable, but it actually makes zero sense whatsoever. Self-driving cars? No. If the fundamental assumption is that every single vehicle everywhere is communicating, that system is fundamentally flawed and will never take off. Remote control? This has been possible for over 100 years. You can literally do that with a spark-gap transmitter, let alone current 4G tech. Immediate feedback? In what context? Augmented and virtual reality? Now you're just blasting buzzwords to sound smart. Come on. Smart city/home is another common buzzword, but that's actually where the vastly increased capacity of 5G starts to become relevant.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/4G-LTE-Advanced-Pro-Road-5G/dp/012804...
That said, do the numbers from the article concern anyone else at all? I'm generally all for progress, but more than 1 million devices per km2? And massive MIMO antenna arrays spraying EM waves in every part of the spectrum from 600 MHz to 50 GHz?
More than a million devices per km2 ~= 3 million devices per square mile. Am I the only one that thinks that's a bit crazy? I don't want everything from my toaster to my door to my water bottle to be transmitting massive amounts of information to who knows where all the time.
More concerning: the antennas. Current regular MIMO 4G towers are 2x2 or 4x4. Already, there are 5G towers installed today that are 128x128. These are planned to be spaced -extremely- densely in cities, and very close to people (on every floor of offices, on lampposts, etc.) This is a necessity due to the spectrum used. And not only that, but they're using new spectrum that hasn't been used before - instead of the MHz to low GHz range we all know and trust, 5G towers will be up to near 50 GHz (!). Especially the fact that millimeter wave/extremely high frequency is normally blocked by everything from drywall to glass, but now we're intentionally aiming massive amounts of EHF waves with hundreds of antennas in a small space.
Call me a luddite, but I'm more and more thinking that we need a high quality longitudinal study about any effects of this kind of stuff before we go from 2x2/4x4 at well known frequencies to putting 128x128 EHF antenna arrays every hundred feet.
Also as a note, regular MIMO (not "massive") wouldn't provide location information as the scattering channel is generally considered random.
But maybe it has a negative effect on anything from birds to bacteria to humans, and I think it's worth investigating that before we deploy it extremely rapidly in all of the world's cities.
I mean, the #1 post on HN right now is how highly skilled engineers accidentally made the Golden Gate Bridge emit a loud noise that's blanketing the Bay Area. And that's a bridge, which humans have been building for some 20,000 years. And it's made out of one thing - steel - which we generally understand very well.
I really hope there will be no side effects. But the chance that there will scares me a bit. 5G will be rapidly rolled out at enormous, unprecedented scale and density in nearly all the big world cities - and in 2020 most of the world lives in cities.
No it isn't. The engineers knew this sound was going to happen. It was not accidental.
And again, the things involved here are bridges (which humans have been making for some 14,000 years) and wind (familiar to humans for our entire existence.) 5G uses little-studied frequencies around 50 GHz that we really know extremely little about compared to the widely used cm-wave.
A really big increase in a number without a framework to contextual it doesn't mean anything.
Given the financial and health stakes (>$100B & >100M lives) a through animal study and RCT trial doesn't seem unreasonable. You could relatively cheaply raise a few generations of animals on top of a 5G antenna and look at cellular and reproductive toxicity. Following that, you could do a RCT with real/ sham antennae in bedrooms as part of roll-out.
Even so I can't imagine this kind of study actually showing anything while wasting multiple years during which we could be moving forward. How about you raise money to fund the study virtually nobody wants to do and if you find something you can watch smugly while everyone tears down towers.
>How about you raise money to fund the study virtually nobody wants to do and if you find something you can watch smugly while everyone tears down towers.
I find this to be a very rude comment. I have no interest in being smug, And honestly don't think it is a high risk. Given the health of hundreds of millions of people, I would like to see some basic confirmatory testing conducted to confirm safety. It is fine if you disagree, but why bother responding if you are just going to make snide comments and be an asshole about it.
Also, the 128x128 5G MIMO deployments I could find were distributed deployments, placing remote radio heads very densely at relevant indoor locations. I assume they're referring to places like large train stations or shopping malls.
Also, regarding the "massive amounts" part: there is little incentive to transmit more than a few hundred mW per channel, just because the mobile device needs to transmit at a similar level anyways, and there are battery and cooling considerations, even neglecting the cost of power amplifiers for these frequencies.
And, the 1 million devices per square kilometer is actually just a dense, standing crowd. It's the average density that can be reached over any sizable area (putting a school class's phones in a box until the end of the lesson would imply some insane density in that box, but there'd be a limit for how many boxes could be arranged into a dense grid).
I understand the MIMO designation, and I am not trying to misrepresent it in my comment. I know that 128x128 is not sixteen thousand (!!!) antennas on one tower, but rather 256, half for rx and half for tx.
That said, two hundred and fifty six antennae on one tower is far, far more (orders of magnitude, plural!) than the typical 2x2 or 4x4 4G towers deployed today. And keep in mind that this is certainly not "just" 256 antennae for one mall, because 5G is blocked by anything thicker than a post-it (the article mentions how future plans include deploying massive MIMO to each floor of a building, as drywall and glass both block many 5G frequencies!)
The reality is that no matter how you want to slice it, 5G means moving from widely spaced 4G towers transmitting at frequencies we have used for around a century to hyper-dense massive deployments of large numbers of antennae transmitting at new and relatively un-studied frequencies. 4G towers are (mostly) kept away from humans getting too close; 5G towers will be on lampposts and on the same floor of your office where someone can touch them.
I'm not saying 5G is inherently bad, or good, I have no idea. I haven't run a longitudinal study, but _neither has anyone else_, and that's what scares me a little. Look, the #1 post on HN right now is how highly trained, expert engineers accidentally made a bridge (one of the oldest human inventions, around for millennia) create an extremely loud eerie noise currently blanketing San Francisco.
And sure, transmit power is low. But it's not just about the power. Today I went out and enjoyed a warming 1000 W/m2 of hundreds of-nm EM radiation all over my body. Then I accidentally looked at the source, which hurt my eyes and disoriented me. Later I played with a device of only 0.01W emitting highly temporally coherent EM radiation. I had to put on safety equipment, because it had the possibility to harm me, including permanently damaging my sight.
I think you misunderstand the concept of directional beamforming. The antennas in question in a phased array are 'elements' that cooperate to steer a more focussed beam in a given direction.
The phone in your pocket when transmitting (whether 3G/4G/5G) is the biggest contribution to your personal health. Not a base station.
I'd be concerned much more about low and mid band that can penetrate much further than high band. I am concerned about high band too (skin surface effects) but know nothing about this and assume work has been done to quantify and assess.
My biggest problem both with 5G hype and those that seek to cast doubt on it is that both sides misrepresent the 'facts' to suit their agenda. Sadly that's true in all walks of life.
I am going to disagree with you that the phone is always the bigger risk. Apparently Huawei 5G base stations are above 11 kilowatts, and these are being rolled out closer to humans than ever before.
Sure, some research has been done, but the vast majority of it has been simply pointing some mm-waves at people for a few hours and checking if they're OK afterwards. I haven't seen anything for babies (baby skin is thin enough that mm-waves can go through the dermis, unlike adults) and not even a hint of any quality longitudinal study.
And yes, I agree, the 5G hype/hate is so rabid that it makes it much harder to find any actual science on the internet about the subject. Personally, I don't have any agenda here. I was generally positive on 5G until I read the details in this great and informative article, and thought "wow, that's a lot of antennas, and a lot of new frequencies, and they're closer to us than ever before"
If you know of any decent studies on this, I'm all ears - please drop any links.
Assuming we are talking about RF power output here, that is far higher than anything I've ever dealt with, and I'm not sure that it's at all right. A typical macro cell has 20 Watts of RF power output (for example).
The relevant international standards are those from ICNIRP, and they've recently updated and expanded on these in great detail around safety margins of various frequencies.
The UK telecoms regulator, Ofcom, recently did a safety study of actual deployed equipment, looking at measuring the RF output from base stations.
Therefore I'm not sure where figures like 11 kW are coming from. Maybe there are some very hot (and inefficient) early base stations somewhere using 11 kW of mains power to produce 20 or 40 W of RF energy? But considering Huawei is heavily advertising 5G as being "greener", that wouldn't seem likely either. But even then, this is far higher than even the wall socket consumption of the equipment I've dealt with.
https://www.fiercewireless.com/tech/5g-base-stations-use-a-l...
The 11 kW seem realistic when you take a multi-sector mast that fills 200 MHz TDD with 1W/Mhz in 3 separate 120 deg sectors (600W), at least once you include the compute to handle aggregate data at a realistic maximum spectral efficiency of ~10 (bit/s)/Hz (6 Gbit/s). These power amplifiers are typically between 10 and 40% efficiency.
If you look at a microwave magnetron (don't), you go blind in seconds from your eyeballs getting cooked and turning opaque. Surgery could theoretically replace them (and leave the retina), but I'm not aware of that ever happening.
It's quite feasible for a sizable eNodeB to consume 11kW, but keep in mind that they have significant amounts of compute hardware.
It'd help if you'd make a bit more of an effort to check/validate/cite the concrete numbers you name, if you don't want to be seen as a "confused anti-5G person". I don't think you are malicious, considering your history, but no everyone will.
Are you talking about a laser? The mechanism of injury is the same as any RF injury -- localized heating. You stick a soldering iron on your retina, you're going to have permanent damage to your vision. The reason you only need a low power to do damage is because the power is spread out over a very small space, because your cells absorb the energy instead of letting it pass through, and because the retinal cells are extremely sensitive to temperature (a 10C increase is apparently all you need to permanently damage them).
> Today I went out and enjoyed a warming 1000 W/m2 of hundreds of-nm EM radiation all over my body.
Skin cancer from exposure to sunlight kills people. UV light has enough energy to rip electrons off of atoms in your body, causing much damage. ("Ionizing radiation.") From physics, we know where the boundary between ionizing light and non-ionizing light lies (in the middle of the UV spectrum). We know ionizing radiation is dangerous -- we understand the mechanism and the effects. (Notice how much safety equipment is involved in getting a dental x-ray. Minimum dose required to get the necessary image. The technician stands in a separate room lined with lead. You wear a lead vest to avoid exposure anywhere that's not needed for the image.)
We also know when ionization stops happening. The energy carried by a photon is directly related to the wavelength of the light, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon_energy. Below the middle of UV, photons don't have enough energy to ionize anything. Thus begins "non-ionizing radiation", which as far as we know, just burns you. You can, of course, die from burns, so it's not harmless. That is how microwaves cook foods -- water absorbs energy from 2.4GHz photons quite well ("dielectric heating"). The RF energy is converted to heat, and makes you a hot meal. But you sure wouldn't want to have your hand in there when it's on.
Anyway, these effects are well understood. Any "5G is harmful" argument needs to propose a new mechanism for causing damage, or show how a known mechanism works at 5G frequencies. You could show that it turns out we were wrong about ionization (experimentally testable). You could show that certain tissues convert all the energy to heat (again experimentally testable).
Sure, there could be a new mechanism for causing damage that only happens at some random location in the EM spectrum not related to any other effects. Someone has to be the first to discover it. Portal 2 has a good quote: "Marie Curie invented the theory of radioactivity, the treatment of radioactivity, and dying of radioactivity."
It seems unlikely, though. You can do an infinite amount of research without discovering something that doesn't exist. People want fast YouTube downloads more than they want a 0% chance of risk. The risk is already so close to zero that it doesn't matter.
> Look, the #1 post on HN right now is how highly trained, expert engineers accidentally made a bridge (one of the oldest human inventions, around for millennia) create an extremely loud eerie noise currently blanketing San Francisco.
I believe they knew it would make a noise. They just didn't think anyone would care.
A deeper problem is that humans are capable of creating much more complicated systems than nature. Ever debug some code and wonder "how did that ever work?" It's just a lot more complex than basic physics, and so there are a lot more unexpected results.
And there lies the body of your argument.
Now I will disprove it:
- Photochemically-induced retinal injury (NOT tissue heating) by 430nm EM radiation [1]
- Exposure to ~600 THz EM radiation disrupting the circadian rhythm [2]
- Living within 50m of a <100 kHz EM radiation source more than doubles the chance of Alzheimer's disease [3]
- Spinal cord stimulation at 10 kHz significantly helped chronic pain [4]
[1]: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1751-1097....
[2]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4734149/
[3]: https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/169/2/167/95445
[4]: https://academic.oup.com/painmedicine/article/20/10/1971/541...
The EM spectrum is vast and complex. Deploying unprecedented numbers of towers, each with more antennas, at higher powers than ever before, at new and untested wavelengths [5], strikes me as risky. You may, of course, draw your own conclusion. As with many technological improvements, we may not know the true cost for many years to come.
[5]: from the above article - up to 2 orders of magnitude more antennas per tower, orders of magnitude more towers, power significantly higher than before, and 48 GHz.
You see, if you hadn't switched the units around, this would have been a good example. But I'm failing at searching a way for how this could have been deliberate, yet non-malicious.
Also, 10kHz is something you get with modern power electronics, not RF. Take a look at the way they couple that energy into the subject, and what the power levels are.
Can you please give a concrete citation for the power being "significantly higher than before"?
I am not sure how these signals come from power lines, which is what the study looks at. I would assume those are in the 50-60Hz range. (But we can use that band for communication too! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremely_low_frequency)
I'm aware of it's usage for pinging currently-diving submarines, and in the slightly higher region, providing wireless bidirectional low-bandwidth comms into deep mines. The power lines do have quite some magnetic stray fields, though. Not that it's too massive; it's not more than a few (3~4) kA at most.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Here's a helpful link. HN can be a great place full of interesting people, but you really do have to assume good faith.
Look, I came into this discussion trying to have an intelligent discussion about the possibile risks of 5G. When I opened the article I was somewhat positive about 5G, now I am somewhat negative. I am not some crackpot saying it will damn us to Hell eternally, I'm saying hey, we've messed around with novel parts of the EM spectrum before, why not at least evaluate the risks first? Never before in human history has anyone lived with a mmwave source, and now we are planning to roll them out at unprecedented speed to all the world's cities without a single longitudinal study on the risks.
I've been playing with different ways to represent things partly for fun, and partly as a filter for this discussion. Anyone who can't trivially figure out that 1 Hz ~= a wavelength of 299792 km does not have the knowledge necessary for this discussion.
Tens and hundreds of kHz RF has been created by humans. The first of studies have been coming out in the last decade about its effects. So far, it looks like living within 50m more than doubles your risk of Alzheimer's.
>> Can you please give a concrete citation for the power being "significantly higher than before"?
Sure. Both MTN and Huawei say that just with current systems we're looking at 200-300% of existing levels. And it's their job to make it sound -good-.
https://www.fiercewireless.com/tech/5g-base-stations-use-a-l...
> and partly as a filter for this discussion
coming. As I said earlier, I am not assuming bad faith from you in this discussion, but didn't see a good reason for mixing these up. It made me consider whether you might have soaked those numbers from popular media or (worse) echo chambers.
I guess it's just another example for sarcasm/humor causing problems on the internet, but this time making me worry whether you got captured by some echo chamber, instead of making the sarcastic author look like a troll.
And, just to note, I personally try hard to not behave badly on HN, so feel free to assume a misunderstanding instead of me assuming/exhibiting bad faith.
The next link suggests an increase in Alzheimer's disease from living near power lines. I am not sure how meaningful the results are; the entire document is caveats on how they selected which data points to use, the field strenghts are vastly different from wireless signals, and the frequency ranges are off by 5 orders of magnitude.
The last link is about a device designed to receive radio signals and apply electrical current to your spinal cord. If the radio waves worked by themselves, why would they implant a receiver?
You latch on to the "large number of antennas" thing, but it's not really a big deal. All the antenna array does is create interference patterns that control the direction of the signal. The antennas are excited with the desired signal with different phase delays, and then the interference results in some spots receiving 0 power (in an ideal case) and another spot receiving all the power. A friend of mine wrote a small simulation you can play with in your browser: https://apenwarr.ca/beamlab/. (The reality is that channel capacity depends on SNR, and while these do increase the signal strength at the receiver, they more importantly reduce the amount of noise that reaches the receiver. It is easier to null out received noise in a certain direction than to transmit power somewhere.)
In the past, we did this with carefully placed antenna elements that receive and re-radiate signals from another antenna element: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yagi%E2%80%93Uda_antenna (among many other designs). Now that DSP has become more powerful, it is possible to do it in software instead of hardware, and get better results. (Phased array radar have existed since the 70s. WiFi and 4G networks also use MIMO.)
I guess my summary continues to be: some sort of mechanism of causing damage will have to be proposed and tested. Maybe things on the very low end are bad (as your study [3] suggests). We know things on the high end are bad (don't get too many x-rays). But those effects roll off, and 5G is in an area where those effects probably don't exist.
Anywhere current flows through a conductor, radio waves follow. We have been using radio for 100 years, and we kind of know how this stuff works. I don't think there is any reason to worry (and many experts in medicine and RF agree with me).
I don't think there'd be any frequency-dependent effects that don't stem from the interaction of penetration depth, triggered circulation (transporting heat away), and deposited power. Neglecting triggered circulation, it'd seem viable to just test thermally-mediated health effects from focused, 0.01~10 W @ 20~50 GHz (spot size limited due to a reasonable (0.1~0.8) numerical aperture of the beam focusing system) radiation.
[0]: https://books.google.de/books?id=4dL6CAAAQBAJ Fig 3.a page 437
Photodissociation is not simply heating. Red light is for example known to affect the mitochondrial electron transport chain
I don't have a study on hand but I expect the effect to be less than lower frequency waves.
First thing to get out of the way, these are not ionizing radiation. Basically, the only thing electromagnetic waves up to visible light can do is heat. UV is borderline.
The question is what they heat. The general idea is that the lower the wavelength, the deeper the penetration. 2/3/4G frequencies will heat your insides, 50 GHz will only heat your skin. Of course the power is so that under normal conditions, the heating is negligible.
As for the effect of millimeter waves, while testing this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Denial_System they subjected people to massive (100kW!) doses of 95 GHz radiation. High enough to actually burn you, and yet, the adverse effects were minimal.
If you are talking about technical problems, like interference, and how to deal with radio waves that are starting to act a bit like light. I guess that 5G is designed by people who know what they are doing. Simply that we are able to make it work is almost like a miracle to me.
And yes, I am sure that 5G is designed by some brilliant people. Anyone getting that close to the Shannon limit is smarter than me. My hat is off to them.
But the reality is that this stuff just hasn't been trialed in any real way. Sure, the US government found 600 adults to get zapped for a few hours and only injured eight of them. But how about living with it for ten years? What about different frequencies? 100 nm is a world away from 300nm which is a world away from 500nm. Sure, they trialed 95 GHz and it was fine. What about 48 GHz? 25 GHz? All the other frequencies being used? What about with 256 antennae transmitting at higher power than anything before, right next to you, day in and day out for a decade?
One big claim is that all this 5G radiation is blocked by the skin, so we'll all be fine! Oh wait, what about babies? Turns out babies' skin is thin enough that mm waves can penetrate the dermis...
Furthermore, ionizing radiation and heating are not the only two ways EM can harm you. Just look at all the news about blue light for one example! EM radiation in the mm-wave range is still far understudied compared to the cm wave range.
Look, I think that 5G is probably going to be fine, health wise. But for something as big as this, it absolutely deserves at least one good longitudinal study. Of which there have been zero.
On top of that the military uses absolutely enormous energies in their RADARs and there's still little if any evidence of risk even including powers where you might as well have you head in a microwave oven
... What? I have no idea what "full" would be, but by any definition they are certainly not. Just a bit of air is enough to attenuate mm waves of even high power. (That's why we need so many towers!) There is not a lot of ionizing radiation out there, that's why we're not all dead (and why x-ray film even works.)
Maybe you're thinking of outer space? But it's not even true there - for an obvious example, visible light, which there is very little of by human standards pretty much everywhere in the universe.
"The military used it for some time and nobody died so let's put it pointing everywhere in our homes and offices" strikes me as a very weak argument for something's safety. As just a simple counterexample for why you cannot use that to demonstrate safety, consider that while mmwaves do not penetrate the adult human dermis, babies' skin is thinner and is easily penetrated by mmwaves.
> "The military used it for some time and nobody died so let's put it pointing everywhere in our homes and offices"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAF_Fylingdales
This is a 2.5MW Phased Array. If there was any provable health risks to these (there are ~10 of them in the west) we would know - there have been suspicions, but they have been investigated and no evidence has been found.
Why do we care about microwaves in particular when there are huge installations like these operating at much longer wavelengths which as you say penetrate further?
If there was immediate danger from electromagnetic radiation it would have been observed years ago - powerful microwave emitters have been in use in very proximity to humans since the second world war (Randall and Boot developed their magnetron in 1940)
I have quite a few of the papers that 5G nuts cite, and they are not convincing in this slightest - there is not a single paper that is both dealing with radiation within FCC limits, on animal test subjects, and have any macroscopic threat to health. This also doesn't include the issue that these papers are usually reports of fairly limited research so there is no discussion of the relative risk of their findings if there are any at all (Historical Evidence as mentioned previously sets an upper bound on that risk too).
Well, first of all, "the electromagentic spectrum" is "in use" everywhere in the universe, and includes things like radios and the sun. What I think you meant to imply is that humans have been living with mm-waves before for extended periods of time. Which is absolutely false. The problem is that mm-waves are attenuated by air, or clothing, or buildings, or the atmosphere, or what have you. There are some mm-wave sources that humans have messed around with, but always for short durations (usually on the order of hours/days) and nearly always with a strongly attenuated signal (air, cars, buildings in the way.)
The reality is that no group of humans have ever lived their normal lives with a mm-wave source, period. The closest you can get is police speed guns, the vast majority of which are in the 10-25 mW range at 10-35 GHz. They are pointed away from the user; either you're the cop aiming them at someone, or you're the person in the car being tracked (if you're in the car, 35 GHz won't penetrate.) Even if you're a cop that decided to just point the radar gun at your face 40hr/week for ten years, that's far, far less exposure than someone living in a city equipped with 5G.
So nobody's lived their lives with a mm-wave source, OK. In order for mm-waves to ever actually get -to- your body, you would have to propose a new massively expensive system deploying massive amounts of unprecedented power mm-wave radios closer to humans than ever before: in other words, 5G.
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAF_Fylingdales (and the rest of your comment)
Come on, that's completely different from what we're talking about here - that's a centimeter wave system. Humans have lived with the presence of centimeter waves for a while, and we are fairly sure they're safe. Cell phones, microwave ovens, RC cars, everything uses centimeter waves.
>> I have quite a few of the papers that 5G nuts cite, and they are not convincing in this slightest
Well, I'd like to point out I'm not a 5G nut. I typically don't bother clicking on those weird rabbit holes of conspiracy blogs tied together with red string based on some inconclusive data. I'm also not saying 5G is dangerous. I simply believe it's unknown. We simply do not know, as a species, what living our lives bombarded with unprecedented amounts of mm-waves will do, as nobody has done it before. Likely it will be harmless; however, there is a chance it will not be. As with many things, it may be the cumulative dose over many years that is harmful.
I wasn't accusing you. They're usually well-meaning rather than overly conspiratorial - although there are a few near me who, let's just say don't mention the Rothschild family near them.
In line with your final paragraph I suppose I agree that we don't know for sure, but it's unlikely.
As to high frequency radio waves specifically, Fighter aircraft have had millimetre band radars which people have worked with for half a century at least now (along with microwave links in the cities and satellite links etc.).
I feel like it's important to point out that long term exposure can't be too long term in the sense that the phenomenon has to be weak enough to have not yet been observed yet strong enough to outpace the churning of biological material in effects.
As a final remark, here is some actual data about 5G exposure in relation to local limits (UK in this case) i.e. fractions of a percent of the ICNIRP guidelines at most. Also, no one I'm aware of has proposed a mechanism as to why the wavelength matters at this scale?
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0015/190005/...
I still respectfully disagree, but that's more because I trust the experts who designed and authorized 5G deployment, including regulations on transmit power than because of extensive knowledge on my part. The risk is never zero, but I think it is low enough for immediate deployment.
And yet a domestic microwave at 800W is enough to both burn the skin in minutes and cause nerve cell damage in few seconds.
Step 1 so far has been Wikipedia, where I found the reassuring sentence "The scientific consensus is that 5G technology is safe.[99][100][101]" Unfortunately, after checking those sources it appears that one is a blog and the other two are news articles about the same event - a press release from the ICNIRP. Further research on the ICNIRP shows that it is a private organization that declared itself that it only considered the thermal dangers of RF in the cm-wave range, and any other dangers do not exist.
And that is the common path to "proving" 5G safety on the internet: "the only way that this could be bad is heating; there's no heating; bam, it's safe, we're done here."
The reality, of course, is that EM waves have many mechanisms of action. So far, we know of the following:
- Ionizing radiation (nuclear weapons, x-rays, etc) can easily kill you or give you cancer
- Non-UV visible light can increase skin aging, cause retinal injuries
- Tons of EM waves can burn you or increase body temperature causing other problems (tissue heating)
- Nerve disturbance from low-frequency RF
That's four methods of ways EM waves can hurt you. Everyone is in agreement about that - no matter how you slice it, there's a minimum of those four. But that's a minimum. Relatively few good quality longitudinal studies have been run about EM waves. "Hey, can we put this weird thing in your home and see if it gives you cancer?" is a hard sell, I guess.
But unfortunately there seems to be not one single high-quality, longitudinal study researching the effects of living with constant mm-wave sources. There are a few short-term studies, but most of these are on the order of hours (!) of exposure.
One interesting thing I did find was a Swiss study showing people living near high voltage power lines were more than two times more likely to get Alzheimer's than people living just 600m away. While that's a completely different type of EM than 5G, it does hint that there may be more harmful mechanisms of EM radiation than we currently know.
Moreover, the power levels you're encountering from a base station are minuscule. It's underappreciated as a miracle of engineering that we can reliably communicate with signals that are 10^-12 W. You're at more danger from a 10W fluorescent light bulb.
Ah, I see you made the same mistake as basically everyone researching mm-waves: you forgot about babies. See, they're born with very thin skin, so mm-waves can go right through their dermis. Will that have any effects? Who knows! It'll be a long time till the first 5G babies will be in college.
Furthermore, a lot of things are cumulative effects. Asbestos, of course, doesn't instantly kill you; asbestosis requires a large exposure over a long period of time.
Look at the research around kHz EM waves and Alzheimer's, for example. We've all been near a HV line for few minutes, I'd bet. When they were invented, I'm sure people tested them by standing next to them for hours - they were fine, of course. Turns out you have to build up exposure over a period of some 15 years living next to a HV line... and then you have a 200% chance of Alzheimer's.
(Also if something just affects babies, it doesn't make sense to talk about the cumulative effects over decades)
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334078749_Millimete...
I do not believe that anything in the tens of GHz is either safe or unsafe. The frank reality is that we simply do not know, as not one person in human history has ever lived with a mm-wave source of any power for an extended period of time.
With new RF technology, the burden is usually on the creators to demonstrate its safety, not random Internet commenters to prove its danger.
I was hoping to have an actual discussion here, but I guess people would rather just blindly defend any new technology without even a cursory look at its safety.
You need a source that shows that there is something different about babies, different about the 5G frequencies, and different from the light, infrared, microwave and radio frequencies that are currently being used everywhere.
Instead, you referenced a paper on a military pain ray that uses focused super high power 100Kw 95Ghz waves that says it penetrates 1/64th of an inch. Your microwave is 2.4Ghz, just like your router, but it works at 1kw. There is an enormous gap between saying "what about babies" and what you linked. They have basically nothing to do with each other. I think you realize that, but you keep saying "we don't know", when you really mean "I don't know".
> the burden is usually on the creators to demonstrate its safety
How can anything be deomstrated to someone who ignores what they are being told and repeats "we just don't know" while supporting their predefined beliefs with giants leaps in logic and excessively irrelevant information?
> I was hoping to have an actual discussion here
I don't believe you. You didn't even confront my original question of what frequencies and effects you are specifically worried about. All you have seemed to being up so far is heat from power 100 times what your microwave uses. 100kw is 4,000 times the power of a soldering iron that can melt tin and lead.
And the broader context of what I am saying is not that 5G is dangerous, just that there should be more effort to determine its safety before rolling out a new type of EM radiation that humans have _never lived with before_.
Looks like I am not the only one saying existing studies do not cover things, and there is a need for further research: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6765906/
> new type of EM radiation that humans have _never lived with before_.
It isn't a 'new' type of em radiation. It isn't a mystery, it is just a mystery to you. You just avoid confronting real information by saying "I don't know". You have been shown facts, your ignorance of the subject is your own fault at this point, but you are desperate to hang on to it.
>> You have been shown facts, your ignorance of the subject
OK, +1 for making me actually laugh. Dude, I am the only one of us linking any scientific studies or literature review whatsoever. You're the one sprinkling snarky one liners about routers burning you. You also still didn't respond to https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6765906/
Just relax: I'm not saying 5G is the illuminati turning the frogs gay, I'm saying -maybe- we should research a new technology before deploying it to humans at an unprecedented scale.
5G is an industry marketing term, not some fundamental redefining of physics. Nothing about emission of radio waves is some new or unknowable phenomenon that requires more research to understand. If you're suggesting otherwise, the burden of providing even a mildly plausible hypothesis is on you, not just "I dont understand this, therefore maybe it is bad".
I've given you real numbers from your own sources and broken them down into intuitive examples. You might not realize this, but this is just an exercise in seeing what someone does when they have to continually reject information while having none of their own to hold on to a belief that is rooted in emotion.
> I'm saying -maybe- we should research a new technology
Now you are saying that, before you were saying "what about penetrating a babies thin skin". It has been researched, you found some research, it just doesn't say what you want.
We haven't even gotten to the fact that microwave communications are already on lots of cellphone towers and used to communicate with office buildings etc. Not only that but these higher frequencies don't even go through walls. They barely go through rain or fog.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
Looking back at your account history I noticed other cases of you attacking other users, which we didn't see at the time and certainly would have moderated and perhaps banned you for. Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23186380.
I appreciate that you've also posted a lot of good comments (but then again, also a lot of snarky ones). If you genuinely want to commit to using HN as intended, we can unban you.
Semi-recent example (shared previously w/ dang):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22133112
The person I'd replied to ... thanked me.
Your reply reads better without the attacks.
Interpretation is part of applying the rules, but I don't think there's so much variance in how we interpret them. Something like that gets pretty regular and tedious after you've done it a hundred thousand times.
"Think of the children!" is getting pretty tired sounding.
Someone said mm-waves cannot go through skin. I mentioned that the scientific consensus is that babies' skin is thin enough that mm-waves penetrate the dermis. I was absolutely not starting a "think of the children".
>> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
The established consensus is that mm-waves do penetrante the dermis of babies. Even recent research can agree on that. Here's one recent source.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334078749_Millimete...
We've had to ask you this multiple times before. Continuing to do it will eventually get your account banned, so please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use the site as intended from now on.
This fear stems from a combination of factors leading to unknown unknowns:
1. Little benefit for consumers with 4G (this is admitted even by pro 5G side implementing the tech)
2. Thus leading to question - who benefits when your toaster joins road sensors in the internet of shit. Webcams already are not doing too hot on the privacy front.
3. Lack of health studies
4. The feeling of being pushed down consumer throats.
5. Last not least the fight between 5G providers/implementers at a state level .
Why not at least do some health studies?
Ref: https://www.huawei.com/en/about-huawei/public-policy/5g-spec....
EDIT: Fixed typos.
https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-expands-flexible-use-c-band... "Makes 280 Megahertz of the 3.7-4.2 GHz Band Available for 5G Services While Relocating Existing Satellite Operations to the Upper Part of the Band"
The millimeter wave stuff is in addition to this for downtown cores, stadiums, etc. 5G modulation itself adds max 15-20% throughput compared to 4G LTE so more spectrum is needed to deliver on the weird promises telcos made.
The commonly stated assertion that spectrum is a limited resource is not quite accurate.
Spectrum is technically defined as a range of frequencies. That's all. In business parlance spectrum is also attached to large areas of land - this spatial dimension is more important than most people realize.
Radio signals themselves exist in space and time, not just in a range of frequencies. More radio signals - and data bandwidth - can be packed into a given space by shrinking the volume a given signal "occupies".
We can do this by reducing signal power and increasing cell density, in addition to other techniques described in the article. More cells, smaller cells. This is a big part of how 5G expands cell network capacity. But the telecoms have downplayed the effect of this relative to the the claim that spectrum is limited.
The mobile carriers have financial incentives to do this. These incentives are lower costs and monopoly control. Fewer bigger cells at higher power are cheaper than many smaller cells at lower power. The monopoly part is exclusive use of spectrum on a given piece of land.
The problem is, the legal attachment of spectrum works with very large areas of land (where km^2 is a smallish unit) and large periods of time (years), relative to radio signals. Both attachments are grossly inefficient.
By shrinking cell size (power) and increasing cell density, several orders of magnitude more network bandwidth is possible, plenty even to share (modulo cost of physical infrastructure).
Spectrum scarcity is a myth. The current legal regime enriches monopolists and is otherwise a tremendous waste of potential. We pay higher prices for unnecessarily limited bandwidth.
What you describe (small cells) is one version of what we call spatial multiplexing. Basically, reuse spectrum in physically separate areas. But you can also do this in a way that doesn't sacrifice the centralized, large cell architecture.
Namely via beamforming. You don't have to share spectrum if you're not dumping power in all directions. Already cell towers are split into three sectors; you could continue to increase sectors, or dynamically point beams at individual users. Being suitably isolated from one another, each beam allows spectrum reuse.
It's not free obviously, it requires more expensive base station antennas, but I think a direction we'll be heading in.
- that every cellphone user in the world is going to just run out tomorrow and buy a phone that's $200-300 more expensive to replace the phones they have now, have been replacing less and less of in the past half a decade, that they barely utilize to its fullest if the network were just prevalent everywhere today
- that some measurable fraction of the towers spaced every 150ft will not be vandalized, broken and sold for scrap in many places in the world and have to be replaced in order to have the throughput as advertised, that the companies will be just excited to replace, whose total cost will be less or the same as current infrastructure costs
- that despite the junk rating of many of the biggest teleco corps, they are well capitalized with pay for such a network from the ever increasing profits they reap from current consumers and wont have to rely on more junk financing and will take great care of the infrastructure just like all the great care they have put into existing infrastructure. Nothing in the future could ever threaten their solvency
I wish them all the best!
You'll have lower energy use modes available for battery powered IoT devices.
You'll be able to be in a very dense crowd and have your services still work.
It is also lower latency that 4G, so things like gaming over your 5G connection become more possible.
These may not matter to you, but they are use-cases that 5G allows.
5G has a lot of possibilities both for improved mobile data and for last mile where it either doesn't exist or is some old 1Mbit ADSL line. But I'm not convinced it will generally make sense to ditch good wired broadband just because 5G is available.
Even if you technically could, I expect the economics won't work out, e.g. throttling/caps/overage charges, for people trying to do a lot of data-heavy things like video streaming if they have an alternative.
It is difficult to know now, but I think the probability is very high that we will "need" the bandwidth down the line for something we will find useful.
This means the spectrum is shared by less users, the uplink is shared by less users, you can serve higher concentration of people.
Out here in the country we'll operate our own "small cells" without permission from ATTVZN and without paying FCC a cent. If anyone notices there will be "investigations" but mostly no one will notice because physics. Eventually industrial users of this tech will realize "hey we don't need those telco goofballs either!" and their lobbyists will muscle through some exceptions. Eventually everyone whose house has sheetrock walls will be so excepted.
Cellular systems have their purpose too - WiFi is not a good technology for covering a city with internet access, as many attempts to do so should prove. Nor would it be wise to allow unlicensed use at high power - ask anyone who's ever lived in an apartment how their WiFi is, then imagine if power levels could be increased by an order of magnitude to or two.
I had the hope, 5G would finally solve the coverage problems in rural areas. sounds like it's just a vanity project after all...
We should not listen to scientists about 5g health concerns?
5g highband is basically an always on radio that can pinpoint specific users. Like,you would be tracked as you move room to room and interact with people. Why is everyone ok with this? Especially when hardware killswitches are not the norm or legally required.
Massive MIMO is not a 5G only thing. 3GPP Rel 13 on 4G already had it for FDD-LTE. And for TD-LTE it was supported from Released 8 or 10 if I remember correctly. Massive MIMO in 5G only meant NR was designed with it in mind. Although mostly in the sense of TDD still, FDD Massive MIMO still has some on going work to do.
But yes, in many case 5G is more like 4.99G. It is pretty much a evolutionary step from 4G Rather than a big leap from 3G to 4G. And we should expect capacity to increase from 5x to 10x.
Also why would I need help when reading a blog post??
It's not about usefulness, not really. It's about engagement and retention - much like newsletter spam and annoying please-subscribe popups, The Metrics always apparently show that they work amazingly compared to a clean page.
I would rather say that there will always be limits of our understanding and building equipment for usage in various mediums, even in a vacuum, we're still only probing our theoretical knowledge of null boundary interactions between photons[0].
> For example, a standard cellphone can fit an array of 72 antennas operating on the 39 GHz mmWave band. A similar 72 antenna array in the 700 MHz low-band frequency would be larger than a typical home door.
And what would it cost? In an environment where cellphone sales have been declining for at least 5 years now at least on the high end (all the games Apple has been playing with sales reporting…), which end users will be willing to bear the cost of the device now?