Boeing, Airbus executives urge delay in U.S. 5G wireless deployment
reuters.com
reuters.com
This process has been going since 2011, with lots of input from stakeholders (the usual slow govt process). The FCC carefully studies interference before opening a band up.
The guard band is absolutely ridiculous at 220Mhz - I thought this was a typo when I saw it. Looking at Boeing comments, Boeing had requested a max guard band of 110Mhz and the FCC doubled that.
We have 30 - 40 countries already operating mobile services in this band. I haven't heard of credible reports of interference.
Finally, longstanding RF rules require that your RF equipment operate in its assigned band. The fault here, if any, lies with airlines and aircraft mfgs to update their equipment if needed. That said, I doubt it's needed.
So seriously, there is some weird FAA stuff going on now.
We wonder why the US infrastructure costs so much. Instead of doing some tests in the years that this was in the cards, the FAA is now throwing up all sorts of roadblocks, just as biden gets ready to spend $1.2 trillion on infrastructure.
Seriously, if this is a real issue, have every airline land near a test deployment of C-band, and figure out which altimeters are so pathetic they need a 200Mhz guard band.
I don't think 5g is evil but I don't see the technical or economic need for it. Replacing 4G infrastructure that is just a few years old and has plenty of bandwidth doesn't make much sense to me.
The people who decide your paychecks typically don't understand what you're doing anyways, so I wouldn't worry about that.
If you make a tool that has been in use for years - long enough that engineers who turned to management are now in senior management position remember using and liking it back int the day - then you can get a good paycheck to maintain it. Of course this assumes that the tool is still relevant 25 years from when you first created it. Note that this is about you creating and maintaining the tool, taking over someone else's tool might work, but is probably seen as a job for a junior developer.
In some cases you can wait for things to get really bad and then be rewarded for saving the day. (I strong oppose this - a good engineer should see problems and fix them before they get that bad)
You can spend 10% of your time maintaining tools so long as the other 90% has great value. Great value means you see the market need and develop the first prototype that demonstrates the idea works (then turn this over to a new team to make production worthy while you go on to invent something else).
You can run numbers to prove that your tool makes a difference. (Some at Facebook can show hundreds of thousands of dollars saved as a result of their tools)
There are probably others - but none are easy to get into.
It does. But not to me. There are entire teams with millions of dollars of budget to improve tooling.
But of course they only do what they like. And my management doesn't care enough to bring our complaints to them. Individual engineer complaints are ignored.
I raised this with the PMs repeatedly as a significant project risk. Oh... we can't do anything about that they chorused. That's a different department, that's a different budget, etc, etc... Excuse after excuse.
The PM salaries sum to about $1M per annum, but 3 laptops are just too hard for them to organise. Too hard. Can't be done. Just stop asking. Shh. We're busy.
I would say, be nice and polite, take your time learning whatever tech you need to get a better job, prepare for interviews, get an offer, shake hands and move on...
I once had to do development on a 640x480 resolution screen because those fancy large monitors are “too expensive”. That place had less than 30 staff.
Take any amazing organization that does great things, give it a bunch of money, and have the revenue stream not get impacted by failure. You get rot. You get IBM 1960 vs IBM the 2010s - present horror show. You get Ford in 1920 vs Ford in 1980. And this isn't limited to the private sector. It's a feature of massive organizations where revenue is divorced from success.
The US Federal Government is an utter horror show. It was once an amazingly capable collection of efficient, nimble organizations. It could hire rogues and mavericks when needed, and was able to fire the desk-riders too. It's now a rotted-out shell. Success happens in-spite of, and never because-of, the organizations themselves.
I always invite people to go and work with one of the US Fed contractors or agencies. Go look at their job postings. Look at the energy levels of the team members. It's somewhere between a DMV and a mausoleum. Ask yourself if you honestly think they need more money or just far fewer, far higher paid staff with the same or even less budget. Then ask yourself if these organizations are capable of understanding, let alone governing, complex domains.
I doubt we'd be able to do that today at at least the same efficiency.
Except, there's also China with superior morale, superior education and superior efficiency, that might have better plans for the resources left behind a fallen empire...
China also has a huge population problem coming and it’s likely that they have already peaked economically (you’ll notice states like China get much more belligerent and bellicose as they fail ala Russia) and even that is due to government mismanagement.
So, my point is China isn’t some grand strategic master. They are a country with their own problems, likely even worse than most countries because problem exposition is strongly discouraged.
This doesn’t mean that America or any other country doesn’t have problems, but China isn’t particularly special here.
Uh, what?
Which it has largely done, and moves on. Saying it's not resilient enough to handle the situation seems to be wishful thinking in that case (and is obviously false in the case of Tiananmen Square or Tibet.)
I'll take shipbuilding, tank manufacture, aircraft construction, and logistics for World War Two, from a prior activity of about nil, as an example of accomplishment.
We tried tying money to success in our education system with No Child Left Behind and it was a disaster. When you have an organization that is struggling to make effective use of their budget, the solution is to replace the ineffective leadership, not decimate their budget and expect them to do better.
If you ever get bought by a Japanese conglomerate and your boss gets fired, rather than being relieved you should be worried, because you're next if things don't improve. I can't fault that logic, but it does seem to make at least some westerners a little complacent, cross-purposefully.
Not sure how this is related to your point about money, but I do think it's cultural. To work in the civil service right is not something our current culture rewards and/or admires. As such, you get a paucity of talent, hustle, and hard workers.
Wow. The whole FM radio band spans about 20MHz, less than 1/10th the range of their guard band.
You should have an emitter frequency in the 200Hz range? sure, you sweep it, but you shouldn't need a total of 400Mhz for your guard.
There has been extensive research and testing that led to this conclusion of concern. You can read more about the background from the independent body that did the investigation:
https://www.rtca.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/SC-239-5G-In...
And here's a great in depth video explaining the concerns from an actual 777 pilot for a major US airline:
It's just theatre. It's there mostly to stop you playing with your phone and pay attention to the flight attendant doing the safety speech. One time, many years ago when phones were literally the size and weight of bricks and avionics weren't prepared for the interference of these new fangled "moveable phones", there may have been a problem with some of them, so the FAA put a rule in.
These days, every single passenger has at least one 4G or 5G device. If this was truly a problem, really truly actually causing radio interference, this wouldn't be allowed. You'd have to walk through an RF detector at the gate, and they would confiscate your devices and put them in a Faraday cage.
Do you know why they don't confiscate your phones?
Because it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because avionics has had to deal with RF interference from mobile phones for decades, and no commercial plane would be deemed airworthy if it had any such problem!
Famously, some of the victims of the 9/11 hijackings got to make phone calls from the air, and/or received SMS texts notifying them of what happened to the other planes.
That was TWENTY YEARS AGO!
They frequently give the safety demonstration before requesting people turn on airplane mode. And besides, there’s no safety demonstration when landing.
> If this was truly a problem, really truly actually causing radio interference, this wouldn't be allowed.
And they would drug and alcohol test pilots before flight, yet you can still read NTSB reports showing toxicology in fatal crashes.
> Famously, some of the victims of the 9/11 hijackings got to make phone calls from the air, and/or received SMS texts notifying them of what happened to the other planes.
Those were satellite phones (or used special ground-based receivers) they weren’t regular cell phones. And they were embedded in your seat-back and presumably certified as being airworthy.
What on earth are you talking about?
You generally can't receive cell phone signal at segment of airliner flight except immediately after takeoff and in final stages of landing, due to optimizations involved in providing said signal (directional segment antennas, with attempts to beam-form towards specific terminals in latest versions). In practice I had hard time and required special tricks to keep a call running above 500m AGL and it probably depended on BTS located on hill above my reference point.
My understanding is it's an FAA rule to prevent talking on the phone during flight (as well as listening to crew like you mentioned, etc.), not some kind of theater (which I understand would be an FCC rule, ostensibly to prevent interference).
Airplanes actually aren't tested for mobile phone interference unless the plane is going to explicitly allow use of in-flight wireless internet. Yes, with modern devices, you have much less risk of interference, but interference happened in the past, and the rule stays mostly to lower the amount of loose, hard and heavy devices that become possibly dangerous projectiles in case of Rejected Take-Off or a crash.
After all, it's easier to put a "theatre" on than try to use reason with barely mentally present (on average) and possibly unruly passengers.
Now, it's reasonable for aircraft manufacturers to say "hey, in the absence of guidance, we haven't had the time to improve this hardware, let's ensure that the replacement timetable and the 5G rollout timetable in landing pathways are well coordinated." And if guidance is indeed absent, that's an incredible failure on the part of regulators, and one we should hold them to task for.
But it's another thing entirely to try to say "5G around airports should be restricted indefinitely." The OP article doesn't give enough detail to determine what it actually is that manufacturers are proposing, but one imagines that if a timeline were specified in their proposal, one reasonable enough for the manufacturers to publicize, it would have been reported on.
> The 5G network deployment in the U.S. starting on December 5 is in the 3700 to 3800-MHz bands then later in the 3700 to 3980-MHz bands. Radio altimeters use the 4200 to 4400-MHz band. [1].
Are these not sufficiently separated? Can this not be tested easily, by blasting 5G frequencies at a bunch of different planes in test flights? They've had like a decade to do this; I'd expect something more concrete then "concerns about potential interference" at this point.
[1] https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/air-transport/2021-1...
In most radio applications a guard band of 220Mhz is absolutely unheard of.
You would do a guard at 10% of bandwidth lets say. On one side you'd have 5%.
So we are talking 1-2 Mhz?
My understanding was planes already had 2-3 altimeters, with guard band spacing of maybe 5Mhz (ie, planes already have devices blasting signals at frequencies much closer than 200Mhz).
It's extremely difficult to have a 170 MHz wide filter at 4.3 GHz with a brick wall response out of band.
https://www.ntia.doc.gov/files/ntia/publications/compendium/...
Because radio altimeters have not been required to tolerate interference above a certain threshold within ~10% of their frequency band, the assumption is that they cannot tolerate it until there is something like a decade or two of production-scale experience without any serious issues. Or until all passenger planes have radio altimeters certified for the new stricter requirements. And because the latter costs money, the industry won't do it as long as other options remain.
If you want to liken the 737 MAX’s failures to road traffic, you have to ask yourself if there’d be broad acceptance of shoddily built, fault-intolerant bridges and freeways. Moreover, would that acceptance be greater or lesser if the public knew that engineers believed their designs were flawed?
This seems to be an entirely BS safety concern made up by US regulators for who even knows what reason.
Urban legend? Maybe? Fun cahoots type of story though.
The mobile phone is just the most common device that is required to have its transmitter shut down, and part of that is that what is fine for home/office environment is not fine in aviation environment (different regulatory domains et al) so the easiest way is to mandate shutting down all transmitters then whitelist certain kinds (2.4GHz stuff like Bluetooth tends to get a pass because 2.4GHz is unlicensed due to possible interference from airliner's microwave ovens)
Anyway, enforcement ultimately depends on flight crew, and you really don't want to know what's the upper limit of their authority.
5g has a very short range, about ~1000 feet. So the solution, to be very cautious, is easy: just don't put a 5g tower within 1500-2000 feet of an airport.
That aside, I'm highly skeptical of these concerns: for years pretty much all electronics were forced to be turned off for unfounded concerns. I remember having to turn off my CD Walkman on plane. Suffice it to say that in the 90's it has no wireless capabilities of any sort at all.
Maybe there is some other turf war or $$$ issue here?
It's much harder to explain that the continuing reason is that during RTO or worse, a crash, your device can turn into deadly projectile killing someone by blunt trauma.
P.S. The uncompromising option is to pack sedated passengers in pods in racks, and believe me, it's not that uncommon dream among the flight crews.
I generally am lucky enough on shorter flights to fall asleep sometime around safe climb is achieved and wake up for landing, but transatlantic is a PITA.
You already need multiple radar altimeters on ONE plane much closer physically and spectrum wise than 5G. In busy airports you already have multiple altimeters operating again closely physically.
Anyways, even if there is interference, it's actually boeing that should fix their systems to operate within their assigned band (ie, operate in the middle of the band, and reject signals outside of band). This is radio 101 stuff.
Something that has been a decade in the making, they haven't been able to conduct basic tests on. I'm a lay person, but can easily think of basic tests that would help resolve this question.
"On a large aircraft two or three altimeter systems are employed and these systems could utilize a frequency offset of 5 MHz to 10 MHz."
Something is rotten with the regulators.
The fact that certain radio systems can utilize low bandwidth does not mean every system is like them.
I've seen bandwidth ranges of 50Hz to 300Hz (that's Hz not KHz or MHz). This is swept or chirped over a frequency (bigger is better for that - so 200Mhz good and they'd probably want more).
But in terms of a guard, you should be able to guard much tighter than 200Mhz - that's what I'm not understanding - but haven't looked at it closely.
As another commenter mentioned, making a broadband filter for such wide bandwidth is... problematic, and it's one of those devices where you might want to use fixed function rather than SDR.
[1] https://www.icao.int/NACC/Documents/Meetings/2018/RPG/RPGITU...
[0] https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/1103192305940/211103%20CTIA%20E...
The FAA complaint is about 3.8-3.98GHz, and all other examples involve no frequency allocations above 3.8GHz
Japan and other countries do smaller guard bands, some let cell service go within 100Mhz (ie, twice as close).
This is really an indictment of the technical incompetence and lack of planning (over 10 years) of the FAA.
I found a research from MNO to use 4.9-5.0GHz for 5G near airport: https://www.soumu.go.jp/main_content/000777475.pdf
tldr: they need 5MHz guard band and emission adjustment for small cell near 5km from airport / for larger cell near 20km from airport.