5G Just Got Weird
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
Are there any technologies enabled by these techniques that are not possible today?
And on the other side, it should be helpful for very dense urban usage. Try using LTE in a large city’s central train station at a busy time and see how you get on.
But yeah, not revolutionary, but should make existing LTE applications less awful in some scenarios where they struggle.
Further, it's theoretically possible to combine 5G and satellite internet where Starlink or similar serves as the connection to the internet backbone for a device broadcasting a 5G network. Connectivity isn't an all or nothing game and 5G is protocol that the SpaceX internet service business can leverage.
A fifth of the US population lives outside of big cities. That's not a big fraction, but it's a small fraction of a very big number. Being able to capture that market even for a decade would basically bankroll SpaceX's Mars goal by itself. And that's not even looking at other countries.
That's about 25 million households, or about $150 billion gross revenue (not profit) over a decade at the price assumptions you give.
If SpaceX’s public estimate of total Mars program cost of $10 billion was reasonable, that might plausibly fund the program. But it's highly dubious that that is even on the right order of magnitude.
Sure, but “rich people's vanity may help finance the program” (and NASA will help finance the program, etc.) doesn’t anything to support “satellite internet will finance the program by itself”.
And there are people living rurally outside of the USA, too.
Starlink could bring rural Asia and Africa into the 21st century with one terminal per village.
I doubt it. There are a surprising number of satellite internet customers in completely illogical places, like in the middle of major US cities. A lot of this probably has to do with the abysmal state of broadband options in the US -- many customers are served by a single wired broadband provider; when they lose faith in that provider (or are denied service), satellite may be their next best option.
It's the last mile that's the issue.
You can find gigabit business internet basically anywhere.
I have a friend whose parents live in rural Kansas who to this day can't get more than dialup or satellite, even though they've called up every single semi-local ISP (way more than once) and said they'd be willing to pay for installation. At this point, they have more than $20K saved for the chance that some company says maybe.
It's simply way more complicated than you're making it out to be.
Found it: https://www.compareandconnectk12.org/
So your friend's parents' $20K gets them a kilometre of dark fibre. Maybe.
Edit to add: point-to-point wireless links might work better, but there again for a reliable wireless repeater you're looking at tens of thousands of dollars minimum in a rural environment. And in Kansas you're going to get bad Fresnel occlusion, so you need really big towers.
There was some ad campaign in Helsinki about two or three years ago telling people to do just this to compare carriers. Telia, Dna, and all the others worked just fine at rush hour at the central station with 50mbps+
I was under the impression that 5G has shorter range and requires smaller cells. That's exactly the opposite of being better for rural areas.
It’s well worth trying but WiMAX tried the same so not novel
> Try using LTE in a large city’s central train station at a busy time and see how you get on.
uh, um, I thought LTE is already at least okay as it is for Shinjuku morning/Comiket queue problem
A lot of times it’s run by the electric companies (coops). They already have the right of way, pole access, and customer relationships.
There are dozens of utilities pursuing this, haven’t heard of any working with 5g.
There was a recent executive order restricting foreign equipment on the grid, and I suspect that’s going to make things harder for 5g.
I’m not saying 5g can’t be used in rural applications, just that it looks like fiber has a big head start. Now that there’s also more LEO satellite internet companies coming in with decent latency and bandwidth, that’s going to be another competitor to 5g in rural areas.
Technology isn't a solution for graft.
The geek can groove on turning cities into the holodeck on the Enterprise.
But one surmises that the appeal of gadget-free living in the country will grow, also.
Seems hard to derive a good balance point with "enough" technology for optimal enjoyment without begetting Big Brother along the way.
(To clarify: He's also claimed that if Biden wins the election, Republicans will literally be hunted in the streets, and I think regardless of your political views that is pretty clearly not actually going to happen, so his ability to predict future events with any accuracy isn't something I'd trust. Source: https://twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/127831632504405606...)
He has stated this in his Periscopes.
For the unfamiliar (contains NSFW language)
That's just the manipulative narrative to make the highly toxic and divisive racist drivel he is peddling more palatable to the more moderate of his fans, who typically fail to see who he really is because their perception of him is framed by Dilbert comics.
I am not American, I have no stake in American elections whatsoever, but people like Adams make me question humanity. The guy makes me sick.
Edit: Not to say that it is good or appropriate now, but there is light at the end of the tunnel, at least for a couple years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Congressional_baseball_sh...
I don't see what 5g brings to this application. This could be a offline application with a one time face/profile database. More probably it would be released as offline face detection, upload face images to the cloud to match and get profiles. 5G has better dataspeeds, but uploading cropped faces over LTE would be fine.
Maybe you could use it more reliably at the ballpark where there's enough density to justify deploying base stations in the new high frequency / low range spectrum.
That could make face identification a lot easier and more reliable. Instead of matching against a database of everyone in the cell tower’s range, it could match against faces known to be in sight.
And yes, the thought of phone providers knowing the fairly precise location of all their subscribers’ phones (and smart watches, and cars, and smart TVs, and fridges, etc) all the time scares me, too.
Imagine all your wireless IoT except you can't block them or filter from the wifi network, they are always connected and you can't see what data they're sending.
Tech doesn't work like that. Good look buying a high end "dumb" tv or a high end smartphone with a jack 3.5. It always starts with "don't buy them" until there is no choice anymore.
The idea is that with 5G you can combine your function generate with your oscilloscope to form a basic network analyser with the data travelling wireless between themselves and your computer. The throughput is high enough, and there wouldn't be any wires.
I think the idea is that they have identified it as an area where they can make productivity gains. If the throughput is there it has obvious in-the-field applications i.e. Who actually enjoys fucking around with cables before you even wire up the DUT - if you want to automatically (say) measure the efficiency of a power supply over some parameter you have to do it by hand (SCPI takes too much time)
Technically it is more much interesting from a Carrier / Backend perspective. Where there are huge unit cost optimisation and ease of management. But for consumers it really is just a faster 4G.
Hahah
No company has ever defined unlimited to be, "really fast for a little bit, then really slow."
In The Diamond Age, if I'm remembering it right, Neal Stephenson has a character describe how the in-world ubiquitous network works, and it's basically exactly that: high reliability through ubiquity of peers, any of which can relay your packets.
We've had mesh networks before, but they've always needed special hardware, distinct from "it's just a router".
The marketing around it is incredible, though. Every undefined or hypothetical market is being tied to 5g. There's pretty much a new version of Betteridge's Law of Headlines - any future product that will "drive 5g" or "needs 5g" doesn't.
I worked on a pilot project with a state government group that wanted remote monitoring of water levels in wetlands and ponds spread across a few hundred square miles of mostly-rural area. wi-fi obviously wasn't an option and getting a WAN mesh setup was a huge pain in the ass and had its own limitations. We ended up testing with 3G, switching on twice a day to report, but the power consumption and data costs were too prohibitive to be practical long-term. 5G power use per bit is supposedly going to be far lower than 3G/4G. Jury is still out on data cost.
I now work in the automotive industry where vehicle logistics can be an interesting challenge. Parking lots for completed vehicles awaiting transport outside factories can be spread across a square mile of land (more if remote overflow lots are used), with multiple locations. There are multiple use cases for inspecting, tagging, remote driving, etc. these vehicles using aerial or ground-based drones and teleoperation to significantly cut down on costs. However, those use cases depend on high bandwidth, low-latency connections and extending effective wi-fi to lots would be massively expensive. 5G is a pretty interesting option here.
As others have mentioned, vehicle-centric use cases abound, but there are some additional ones for industries like oil & gas as well.
From what I understand, the range of a single 5G base station is significantly lower than 2/3/4G so they are having to install new cell sites in major towns and cities just for 5G coverage.
The focus on millimeter wave is large part due to existing capacity problems in high density areas, or for high bandwidth applications.
But wouldn’t it work for this use case he had?
I believe that in the long term and as the number of devices per unit of area increases, licensed technologies will be the only viable option.
However I've seen that there is proprietary protocol symphonylink from LinkLabs, that uses LoRa. They claim that it allows for having every frame ACKed, even bulk data uplink (OTA firmware upgrades). If so, I would tend to pick such technology for pond water telemetry.
For shorter ranges because higher frequency.
For average per-bit cost, because more bits/sec in the higher frequency encoding.
But, for IoT there is the burden of turning the RF segment on, finding lock, sending. So, for small 'grams' of message it won't necessarily be as good as the per-bit cost for streaming data or long lived associations. And, shorter ranges: You will be deploying more base stations. Albiet with lower power budget too, but .. Nothing is free.
A solar powered system out in the open should, theoretically solve the power issue.
5G’s actual advantages will be more prosaic which Ironically will lead to them being more profound. It’s not really clear which they will be though.
It does, just not for you and I. We will be surveilled more completely and inescapably than ever.
No, it's a low maintenance, low latency horse. The start-up time of cars is a few orders of magnitude faster than horses. And they can be housed in very little space and basically ignored when not needed.
I'd say it's impossible to know what super-high bandwidth and low-latency will bring to the table as the next killer app. It's going to be something we don't expect.
What new market is 5g enabling?
The more interesting feature in 5G is the signalling for IoT devices, those that wake up infrequently. Metering devices, handheld payment devices, patient home monitors, security systems, Airton, etc.
5G isn't really about more bandwidth but always on and more efficient use. This will enable more than just phones and a few tablets.
That is, 5G isn't just mmwave; it's also getting more out of existing low and mid band spectrum. (And mmwave, of course, will unload the other spectrum too somewhat in the densest areas).
AR glasses for example, could totally upend all of this and require 5G low latency, and fast accurate positioning. Yes, 5g when it arrives next year, won't change anything. However, 7 years from now, it may be the enabling platform for AR glasses the way 4g LTE was the enabling platform for smartphones.
Really, how useful was a 2g (Edge) iPhone without a wifi connection?
Very. Lots of sites had mobile versions of pages by the iPhone's release. These were originally intended for Blazor and pocket IE but they worked fine for an iPhone on EDGE. I could do e-mail just fine on EDGE as well.
I used to joke that slapping Gopher or a libcurses based apps on these phones would be superior (IMHO, the experience was inferior to an Amiga on a v34 modem dial to Unix)
Mobile Web apps are not really functional at EDGE speeds. And certainly todays' media, which is rich with imagery, would be completely overwhelmed at EDGE/3g speeds, even if you remove the overhead of HTML and JS bundles.
Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, all of these apps would be terrible on EDGE.
The thing is, we are so used to high bandwidth now and its availability, we seldom realize how dependent we are on it until we lose it.
I went through just about every family of PDA and smartphone before the iPhone came out. Their web browsing universally sucked. The iPhone was a huge leap beyond other mobile browsers. The whole idea of clicking links being agonizing is either fiction or hyperbole.
It's funny you claim YouTube and Facebook would be terrible on EDGE when both services had mobile apps in the days of EDGE, YouTube even shipped on the iPhone. That isn't to say they aren't better served by higher bandwidth cellular service but they existed and functioned in the past.
High bandwidth connections are expected today and plenty of services would be unworkable without them. At the same time many web services are downright wasteful in their design and implementation.
Increased end-user bandwidth has just been eaten up by lazier or stupider designs and implementations. I fully expect these trends to continue as 5G rolls out. No one will actually do anything interesting because sites will load twice the ads (in 4K) and quadruple the size of their JavaScript bundles.
>clicking links being agonizing is either fiction or hyperbole.
Web 1.0 over EDGE is agonizing in latency. Without Javascript, every action that isn't a #anchor in the same page becomes a round trip. If your radio has gone to sleep, it takes even longer. And I was being charitable giving you EDGE, in 2007, many people were still on GPRS.
It's absolutely self evident that faster networks enable entirely new applications, just like increased memory beyond the 640k limit enabled new apps.
5G "low latency": I'm not impressed with "1-2 ms" first hop latency; 0.1 ms should be achievable by now, surely.
AR over networks: Maybe. But I think having more compute out on the edge nodes is going to deliver more for us in the long term than faster comms.
Every extra millisecond in the rendering pipeline decreases the usability of AR significantly.
[1] https://superuser.com/questions/419070/transatlantic-ping-fa....
I don’t think even 5G is low latency enough for what you’re describing—not even close. Stadia works because it’s not VR, so they have some latency headroom. For good VR (Valve Index, etc), you get around 20ms for the entire rendering chain.
And the local device will just have a 2D image. Even within a single, local PC, multi-GPU rendering is basically dead for video games because no one has been able to get them working reliably. And that is with the full bandwidth and latency of PCIe.
Let's say you walk up to a restaurant. As you look at it, you see a virtual waitress outside. The you can see the menu floating there, interact with virtual food models, interact with a fully animated and articulated intelligent agent. This all has to load dynamically in a an "AR Web"-like environment (no way you're going to download and install an APP per local brick and mortar).
For this to scale, and not have hideous load times, there's got to be some kind of quad-tree/oct-tree like index (or other spatial acceleration structure) that's streams in, LOD streaming, and for this to work, the "sidelinking" stuff they talk about will be a huge boon.
Because the "internet of things" in an AR world isn't an "internet of PHYSICAL things" like door locks and web cams, but also an "internet of VIRTUAL things" to control, like virtual vending machines to order food. That means somewhere nearby, there's a next-gen router-like device, that offers side-linking, and has an IP service in it serving up assets to you. Now, it could go up through your phone carrier, through the internet backbone, into a cloud provider, or it could avoid that round trip and talk directly to the restaurant's "virtual POS" 5g device.
Point is, we don't know how this is all going to work yet, and it's very premature for people to pooh pooh the use cases for higher bandwidth or lower latency.
Maybe I'm just getting old, but this all sounds tedious and cumbersome compared to just having a menu stuck to the front window.
But the genesis is always a bit counter-intuitive, because people don't build things for which there's no use case.
E.g. Machine agent consumable mobile services were created because people had mobile devices capable of consuming them. Nobody would have wasted time porting physical data into machine-readable format before the devices / use cases existed.
So the killer app, in this case, would be having your phone auto-filter / -alert you if for menu item(s) that match your preferences. Or create an ecosystem where menu costs are negligible, and restaurants are free to pivot to ingredients-of-the-day.
Graphics hardware keeps getting more powerful and cheaper though, I don't think cloud rendering is going to get more useful over time compared to just rendering on the phone and using cloud streaming for big assets.
These are the services that Sprint offered over 3G on feature phones.
https://www.sprint.com/cdma/assets/pdfs/services_guides/pers...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MobiTV
On my first phone with Sprint Vision, it did 1 FPS.
https://www.cnet.com/reviews/samsung-sph-a840-sprint-review/
On a webpage without 80mb of javascript, it's quite useful.
5g may makes Unity and Flutter "acceptable" for webapp on smart watch that was pre-installed.
It was sufficient to do most things, even streaming online radio. The biggest downsides were that latency was high and the annoying speaker buzz problem. 3G was a big step up. I never felt like LTE came as much of an upgrade over 3G, from there user point of view, so I question it being the defining technology for smartphones.
Most other applications don’t really care about latency. If anything, we’ve used software to move lower latency applications like voice to crowded, latent and unreliable networks.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/12/5g-as...
>Noting the dense deployment of cell sites that millimeter-wave spectrum requires, he commented: "This means that a wireless company almost needs to become a cable company to make it work."
The tower still has to ping the rest of the network to find the service you were requesting to in the first place.
If total latency ~ 500 ms, phone-to-tower is maybe 50ms of that in 4G. Even if it's down to ~1ms, total latency is only down 10%.
Not a networking expert so maybe I'm missing something here. Perhaps better use of CDNs could make this much faster?
E.g. https://aws.amazon.com/wavelength/, but if you’re big enough I’m sure you can make more interesting deals.
How did you come up with 500ms for comparison? A fast-paced videogame with that sort of latency would be unplayable. 100ms is still considered bad and 50ms is considered acceptable.
Each individual network call is faster tho, good point.
Maybe 50 microseconds, not 50 milliseconds. 1/1000th of what you assumed.
Towers are typically up to a few miles away in dense areas; they don't work well beyond 15-20 miles from the cell phone.
Waves go 186,000 miles (or 300,000 km) per second. Assuming a 10 miles distance from phone to station, it takes ~25 microseconds to do the trip, which is ~50 roundtrip.
So, in other words: latency is NOT affected by 5G much.
5G with low latency and unlimited data could be a game changer (pardon the pun) for mobile gaming. It works on 4G. I've tested. But you definitely run into latency issues.
Of course, it's not just games that might be streamed this way. Any computing device could be.
I think the question is not “technologies enabled” but rather “useful applications enabled”. We’ll find out, I wouldn’t count it out. I would expect it to be enormously expensive if it hits, get people s/addicted/accustomed to it and they’ll pay $500/month.
5G technologies allow for more devices to send more data using less power. This is achieved using a huge variety of new technologies. For instance, with beamforming, the tower sends a directional signal to your phone based on its location instead of broadcasting an omnidirectional signal. This uses less power and supports for more users.
What consumers see is much higher data rates for the same price, which doesn’t seem that important. But on the industrial side, there will be offerings that allow for low data rate, low power applications at cheaper and cheaper prices.
oh great, now my appliances can phone home even without connecting to a wifi network.
However you do already see some devices include a sim card. Home "smart" meters for the south of England operate this way. I believe some cars do to.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davekeating/2018/04/01/starting...
This is only a problem if you wish it to be.
Right now it's already hard enough to have a smartphone's software not spying on you.
I think this is in part due to data caps. Nobody takes advantage of the speed, because that could mean burning an entire month's worth of data in 10 minutes.
Which is still a lot of places, but you can get truly unlimited contracts in some places now, for reasonable amounts.
This makes it sound like this was not possible before. But e.g. my mobile provider Elisa never did have data caps in the first place, it's been unlimited since GPRS (and no weird tethering limits either).
These deals seem to be getting more common here in the UK, and I pay around £20 per month for it.
I really hope they'll drop the daily "limit". They can't legally complain about tethering here. But the daily abuse limit is just an annoying thing.
Out of curiousity, what's a good source of information on 5G? I assume the standard itself is not the easiest thing to digest so I'd appreciate your input.
https://5g.systemsapproach.org/index.html
Use srsLTE's simulated channel model to start with, as if avoids the cost of hardware and the regulatory restrictions on making an actual radio transmission. Only buy radio hardware if you graduate to wanting to experiment with actual transmissions and have developed the knowledge to not get in trouble with the regulators.
Once you have the demo running, download the standards [2] and start digging though the srsLTE source code with the standards by your side for reference. The source code makes the standard digestible and includes comments with references to documents, teaching you the best places to start. Because you have a live system running you can experiment as needed to understand something.
5G is an evolution of 4G (LTE), so whilst the srsLTE isn't a complete 5G implementation it will teach you enough about 4G (which is the foundation of 5G) that you will probably be able to understand 5G.
I've found this approach to be a valuable way to learn about LTE/5G, but I do have a background in such systems. My feeling is such an approach would work for someone with a software background, even if lacking the radio knowledge, as the srsLTE source acts as a "roadmap" and the necessary background reading (MIMO, coding, ...) could be done on an as needed basis as the concept is encountered in the source code.
I think the biggest advantage is the other way around: devices using less battery power for transmitting signals, so batteries would last longer.
(And I'm betting that if receiving would be less power-intensive for these devices if the incoming signal has more power, then the towers would use more power, not less.)
But you're right about the other advantage of beamforming: less interference.
Nitpicking, 3GPP Rel 16 / 17. There is no such thing as LTE 16 :)
But generally yes. 5G is basically a much better 4G.
If it's not going to make things faster and cheaper, I'm not eagerly awaiting its arrival like many would have us believe. Isn't that the point of technology?
That’s just the US market, though. I can’t speak to other countries.
There have been a few HN submissions in the past linking to papers concerned with the effect of 5G on insects.
As a layperson I was not able to evaluate those papers. But if anyone knows if there was any kind of consensus reached about that, or even if this is something that anyone serious is concerned about, I would appreciate the pointer.
And at some point they were just gone. From everyone's house. It was not just one day, but we just understood that there are no cockroaches around.
It's still possible to find them somewhere, I guess, but that's a rare event. Something's changed.
Some people think that's because chemicals finally became effective and eradicated them. And some people think that's because of cellular networks which appeared everywhere around that time. I never found definitive answer, just speculations.
I just checked the 5G map. I saw roaches where there's 5G. So if it makes some difference, it's not much.
Funny thing, in the house where I grew up, I saw the same phenomenon as GP. We had constant roach infestations in the kitchen, and after years of different chemical treatments, they were suddenly gone for good. Always attributed it to an effective chemical or a random biological process. Still see them in other places in the city nevertheless.
Why are we even entertaining this on Hacker News though? Show me the papers, GP’s anecdotes or mine are worthless.
The problem with cockroaches is that they'll eat a small amount of something, throw it up, and then avoid it. Even if you just barely kill one, it'll just die, and its hundreds of children will replace it.
Modern poisons are tasteless, odourless, and aren't directly poisonous, so the cockroach doesn't feel bad and doesn't throw up. It can't learn to avoid it. These chemicals are designed to be converted into a poison by an enzyme in the body of the cockroach, slowly. This means that the chemical is basically harmless to pets, humans, and other animals, but lethal to this one insect species. It also allows the roach to consume hundreds of times a lethal dose before starting to succumb to the effects. When it does eventually throw up and die, any other roaches that consume the vomit (I know, eww, but apparently this happens) are eating the precursor, not the poison, and once again can easily consume many times the lethal dose. This has a multiplying effect on the efficacy, as roaches will often throw up and die in their nest, poisoning their entire brood.
As anecdotal evidence: I had WiFi and 4G in my previous apartment, but roaches everywhere. I deployed the roach bait gel, and they vanished. My new apartment has 1 bar of mobile reception, but there are no roaches anywhere because here the building management gets an exterminator to put out roach poison gel.
That's probably why you've seen the roaches disappear: the marvels of modern chemistry, not physics!
Pre-covid it was that 5G was making everyone physically ill. Post-covid it's that the radiation is mutating the virus to make it more deadly or spread it more quickly.
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/conspiracy-theorists...
The post covid comment is clearly disinformation. It was used and promoted by the media in my country as a strawman argument for anyone who had concerns about 5g.
Its important to promote the most creditable voice rather than the least. When the least creditable argument is promoted you know the promoters don't want to deal with the argument at first principal, you believe X this crazy person also believes X there for you are Y.
Its a common framing technique used by the media, you will start to notice it everywhere on both sides of the media echo chamber.
Which is stupidly dangerous.
Did the previous standard lag behind or is this improvement truly this ridiculous?
Say, in 10 years from 1985 to 1995, personal computer CPUs developed from 80286 @12MHz and 134k transistors to Pentium MMX @133MHZ and 3.3M transistors, with at least 100x improvement in integer performance alone, to say nothing about FPU and the vector unit (MMX). And another similar jump occurred in next 10 (well, 11) years when Intel unveiled the Core line of CPUs.
That's pretty good news. Even a simple "sharp braking" type coms between cars has decent potential to save lives beyond what can be achieved with radar & the like.
This is "the DRM problem", but in reverse. There is no way to give an end user a device that can send cryptographically-protected messages while also guaranteeing that they can't generate messages other than the ones the manufacturer wants them to send. One can make it very, very hard to do so, like with TPM/trusted enclave hardware, but when the potential consequences are people dying in car crashes, and the motivation to send false messages is so high[1], it's just an awful idea, because it will absolutely be misused, and people will die as a result.
Vehicle-to-vehicle communication makes this even worse. At least with a tower intermediary, there would be some sort of forensic evidence stored outside of the vehicles involved.
[1] The ability to manipulate traffic in order to get to one's destination faster would be a huge selling point for a lot of people.
It's the unintended consequences that will generally kill people, like causing a multi-car pileup because the tailgater whose car was forced to brake was being tailgated themselves.
There will be very little way to enforce laws against that kind of activity, because there won't really be any forensic evidence at all.
There is no good way to do this. Even assuming a 100% flawless implementation of a "trusted enclave", people will just buy an ECU from a scrapped car, hook it up to a device that simulates the right sensor input to generate certain vehicle-to-vehicle communications, and stick it in the trunk of their actual car.
With 5G and IPv6 you don't really much app-layer security, with the right APIs to give you access to the mobile layer security. The telcos already have the infrastructure to do ID verification on a mass scale and hand out SIMs tied to real world people, or real world manufacturing companies.
Edit-I doubt anyone would be able to make a zero trust network like that incorporate control components. It’d probably be like “I’m going 100 mph with no governor active.” The receiver chooses what to do.
The more difficult question is how to know whether the car that sends out the message is on the same road as you, and not e.g. on the opposite direction of a highway.
More than humans and their flakey attention span & slow reactions?
I mean yeah any complex system has potential for abuse & steps should be taken to mitigate that seems like a solvable problem in the bigger picture.
Ensure signals are sent with identifying information (which license plate sent it), and you get 20 years in prison for falsifying the signal or sending it incorrectly, plus whatever manslaughter/murder charges come on top of that.
I can't imagine autonomous hard braking etc though - perhaps these sorts of messages would just be used by cruise control systems to discretely create more space between vehicles ahead, or put up a "traffic/accident reported ahead" warning for humans to decide what to do.
Click bait is one thing but poor form in this context and publication.
That said, the unlicensed spectrum thing sounds absolutely awful. Sorry your wifi will suck because your local telco decided to beam 5GHz to your neighbor, and your AP understands that as "collision" at best, and "weather radar" at worst.
I thought that was thrown out of the plan, with torches and pitchforks? With DFS wifi is already super crammed, and now "right of way" managed spectrum people want to land grab it for profit? That's so not cool.
"Tesla, hail the Hyundai behind me!"
I'm nobody in the domain of wireless physical protocols, so I wouldn't know, of course. But does it actually even make sense to mix up peer-to-peer and peer-to-tower communications within one protocol? Why would you even want that? To be able to do all this stuff on the same frequencies? Having (more-or-less) same chip for everything, regardless of if it needs close-range and/or global network communications not only disgusts me "politically" (privacy issues, totally absent transparency, you know all that stuff), but also means more complicated, more expensive tech where you could do with cheaper one. And doing everything there is to do wirelessly on the same frequencies means these frequencies busy as fuck. Wouldn't you actually want the opposite for the protocol you hope to become the ubiquitous high-throughput cellular network protocol? It seems like it would make more sense to send 2 identical messages (or even to use 2 chips, if need be) on different frequencies if you actually need both for some reason.
Haven't we already seen bad actors will misuse mobile tech to track our movements, spy on people, (etc) on a wholesale scale?
This seems to be wilfully charging down the road of making it worse?
Unfortunately though, they really should.
5G will be great for advertisers, insurance companies, police forces, totalitarian governments and NSA-type organisations. (It may be useful here and there for manufacturers, miners, and farmers.)
Oh well, carrying a smartphone was great while it lasted.
It will be interesting riding a motorbike through these years.
> [...]At those scales, 5G could function essentially like Wi-Fi networks.
Now that's going to get interesting, I hope. Will we finally see a reliable alternative to 802.11?
LTE was already using a whole lot of frequencies adjacent to Wi-FI, and I'm sure similar bands would be a critical part of making a private 5G network since you want to go through minor obstacles. Millimeter-wave on the other hand could be useful for speed but I bet it wouldn't be a critical part.
While there is something human and nurturing about getting a hug or shaking someone’s hand, very high quality shared virtual spaces will open up many business and social opportunities. Endless possibilities...
Edit: I'm legitimately looking for good sources on this. Not trolling.
> RF-EMF has been proven to be harmful for humans and the environment.
Which... is true-ish? That's a bit like saying water is harmful to the environment and humans. For sure it is, if it's rushing at you with incredible velocity and mass (power). Electromagnetic radiation could certainly harm a human - with enough power. Drinking a glass of water or sending a ~100mW 2.5ghz or ~50mW 5.0ghz signal at your body is harmless.
Maybe a better example is solar radiation or sound, which is much more similar to a 5ghz signal (re: invisible radiation). A bit of sunlight is probably good for you - intense, unfiltered, high-powered UV light could roast the whole earth.
A good study to dive into some of the effects of 5GHz/100mW radiation would be https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6765906/
A good snippet:
> The three in vivo investigations addressed a variety of issues including acute effects on muscle contraction, skin-reflection properties (which are more of a dose-related than health-related issue), and skin cancer [19,54,57]. The rat skin cancer study (one to two weekly, short-term exposures at 94 GHz, 1 W/kg; DMBA-initiated animals) did not show any positive outcome [54]. Another study examined the muscle contraction of mice and described some responses [19]. Again, 94 GHz was used, but power density or SAR values were not reported.
So at incredibly high power (94GHz / 1W/kg - thousands of times more powerful than what we're talking about with 5g) there were no positive outcomes for a skin cancer test. It was possible to stimulate muscle contraction, which makes total sense: pump enough electricity through the air to contract a muscle. But mammal bodies are great at insulation (our skulls are amazing at protecting us from rouge radiation).
The same study is also mentioned in this article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Denial_System and (https://www.wired.com/2009/08/pain-ray-first-commercial-sale...) which is about "pain guns" - systems that use radiation to inflict pain from a distance. It mentions a beam power of 30 kilowatts! That's 300,000x more powerful, and the weapon doesn't work if the person is wearing a thick sweater. It takes a _ton_ of power to interfere with organic objects.
Edit: I do want to say that I think more investigation should be done re: radiation pollution and it's impact on micro-biology, insects, birds, etc. Humans are really resilient, but it's not super clear that for example, some algae might not respond to low levels of radiation in interesting ways. My intuition says it's unlikely, as there is tons of low level radiation flying around in nature - 5g isn't some new, different kind of energy, but further study should be done, absolutely. I'd suspect light radiation is far more dangerous to bugs and bacteria than 5g though.
Also the same people that are the type to complain vocally about the harmful effects of 5G seem to be the type to complain just as vocally about the fine they get when they're caught texting while driving.
I'm not outright saying they're all a bunch of loud-mouth hypocrites, I'm just saying I've made some observations that warrant more research. I think we should ban them all, just to be safe, until we have more information. Don't you agree?
But the goal of 5G is to be literally everywhere, as close to you as it will be to me. So naturally there are more people who could theoretically be concerned about that. And you hear about 5G often enough. So if there is even slightest possible reason to be concerned about that, I would automatically know it concerns me as well.
So I see nothing surprising about that.
I should have added a /s to make the satire more obvious.
I'm fairly certain that every country bathes in the cancer-causing, ionising radiation of the Sun.
The nearest star is literally an unshielded nuclear reactor, putting out kilowatts of deadly radiation per square meter. You can feel it on your skin. It warms you up so much that that you can outright die from the excess heat in minutes. The radiation burns it causes are so bad that it leaves painful blistering after less than an hour of unprotected exposure.
Yet, the same people blathering on about the milliwatts of 5G radiation -- which you can't feel and has never burnt anyone -- will cheerfully go to the beach and get a sunburn until they're bright red like a lobster. They'll take their kids too and neglect to put sunscreen on them.
Cancer, apparently, is just fine as long as it's natural.
The difference between 3G, 4G, and 5G is largely the protocol, not the radio power!
The reason we can have 5G now, and not twenty years ago, is largely due to Moore's law. It is now possible for embedded and mobile devices to have sufficient computer power to "talk" using much more complex protocols than was practical before. They can use better encodings, more complex symbols, smarter echo and multi-path detection, clever error-correction, complex scheduling, etc, etc...
All of this efficiency actually serves to reduce the amount of time the radio is "on", because more data can be sent in the same amount of time. That's what "higher spectral efficiency" means! Arguing against 5G is to say that their preference is the older, less efficient, and more RF polluting standards like 3G and 4G.
(Mind you, first-generation 5G devices eat more battery, but that's largely because they're right on the edge of what's possible for the logic component. Using the latest and greatest 5nm technology saves little or no power, and it'll be the next-gen 3nm process that will truly unlock the power savings. There was a similar transition with 4G from 3G.)
However, such arguments with such people are futile. They didn't arrive at their position through evidence or logic. They got there entirely as an emotional, tribal reaction to what they see as an external group entering their boundaries without their permission.
The ones that won't be convinced are those that believe 4g and 3g are also bad, the ones who were against cell phones when they first came out. You've probably seen them draw the correlation between cell phone use and brain tumors. They believe there is some as yet unknown mechanism by which non ionising radiation can cause cancer. I believe the most common explanation they use is that they don't believe in a cell membrane and instead in a potential field through which molecules pass based on their charge. Supposedly because EF radiation changes the magnetic field around the cells it causes increased permeability resulting in some unwanted molecules disrupting the cell.
> the protocol
Physical protocol, so it doesn't really debunk much. Different wavelengths, different modes of sending/receiving. I seriously have no idea if there is or isn't any reason to be concerned about that, and it wouldn't surprise me very much if it eventually turns out that this isn't all just crazy people mumbling. After all, there's no conclusive data and there's much more initiative to support 5G than to fight it, so if there is somebody talking sensibly about some real dangers, I expect that I wouldn't hear about them for way too long, since they would be lost in the noise.
So, really, I wouldn't be so fast to dismiss any "dangers of the 5G" activists, even if they aren't saying anything very conclusive right now. I seriously don't know if there can be anything to be worried about, but I am pretty sure that anybody who could possibly conduct any studies on that, will allow only studies with "good" results. I kinda have some trust issues, when it comes to dealing with large corporations.
Which generally decreases the required RF transmit power, because of 1/r^2 scaling laws.
> Physical protocol
Not really. If you read through the 5G spec, it's mostly about upping everything. If before there were a few packet sizes, now there are more packet sizes for more efficient packing. If some encoding topped out at, say, QAM64, it goes to QAM1024 now, but only at short range.
Most of the above was constrained by client-side silicon protocol processing, not radio technology.
It's vaguely similar to H.265 vs H.264. They're not fundamentally different. The newer encoding just does... more. More block sizes, more transforms, etc...
> I wouldn't be so fast to dismiss any "dangers of the 5G" activists
You really should be that fast, in the same way that you are fast to dismiss Flat-Earthers. The 5G conspiracy nutjobs have zero interest in evidence, or science, or facts, or any of that stuff.
> I seriously don't know if there can be anything to be worried about
If you have no understanding of the technology or the physics, don't comment.
Seriously.
The hard-core conspiracy theorists are kept going by a surprisingly large group of ignorant people who don't know any better.
Telecoms towers have been burnt to the ground. Staff have been physically assaulted.
This is the same idiocy as the people attacking volunteers distributing vaccines.
If you want to reduce your personal health risk from mobile data technology, then simply stop texting while driving.
If you want to reduce your cancer risk from radiation, use sunscreen.
But please, stop supporting the "concerned Facebook mom" group.
> basically nothing to support their claims
I studied physics and I read the 5G standards manual.
Have any of the 5G conspiracy theorists done either?
Have you?
But it seems it won't deliver.
Why do they do that?
To me, it seems inconvenient as a replacement for 4G. However it is also being used for other applications; like self-driving cars[1].
[1]: https://www.cnet.com/news/5g-could-make-self-driving-cars-sm...
> The HTTP 418 I'm a teapot client error response code indicates that the server refuses to brew coffee because it is, permanently, a teapot.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/418