Someone debunk this for me please: http://www.5gappeal.eu/about/
Edit: I'm legitimately looking for good sources on this. Not trolling.
Edit: I'm legitimately looking for good sources on this. Not trolling.
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 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?
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.
> 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.