I live in Brussels, internet over 4G works great and nobody complains about it being slow.
I am willing to change my mind if somebody proves why we need to upgrade but (and as much as I love new tech) "if ain't broken dont touch it", if anything just make it cheaper.
They will discontinue all the older networks? I can run my new device from this year old good old 2G if I want to. I don't think you are correct in this.
Who still operates 2G networks? It's not at all profitable to use such spectrum-inefficient tech in any area that has enough density of customers to warrant running a cell tower in the first place. 3G networks are starting to be phased out already, because upgrading radios is cheaper than acquiring spectrum that's currently allocated to incumbent non-cellular uses—and holdouts running obsolete phones aren't numerous enough to worry carriers.
Yes. Telephone companies can do this. You are correct about it.
I don't have an answer to your question so I'm just speculating over here and it's quite possible that I'm wrong
I think as soon as that happens (someone shuts off a network) someone else will set up new networks to provide the old service.
Open source technologies exist to set up base stations right now [1]
I think we're headed towards an open spectrum future. Soon most communication could take place on unliscenced networks [2]. Or more and more networks could become unliscenced.
The G networks are not the only way to communicate. It is also important to note that the G networks are now simply internet enablers.
I don't have any data on this but I'd love a comparision of telephony and data services on use today. How much data people use in calling vs using Facebook for example?
Also consider that all telephony comapnies are betting big on IOT.How many IOT devices works on a G network?
If you have a modern device all you need is WiFi.
That however does not mean that telephone companies would cease to exist. Someone still has to provide infrastructure. They just won't have to spend so much on acquiring liscence s. Which also means more competition from unliscenced providers.
Device manufacturers would be able to work on a common network technology stack.
By the way I don't have anything against 5g. I also don't quite understand health implications so I'm unqalified to talk about it. But I don't like having to buy a new device just to use a new network.
I do not quite grasp the telecom technology/infrastructure yet, but in terms of OpenBTS (which provides software-based base station) and Osmocomm (open source baseband), where does https://www.opennetworking.org and https://telecominfraproject.com stand in terms of open source infrastructure for 5G?
4G, just like 3G before it will get slower over time. The spectrum is still shared, and the more devices are connected on the 4G bands, the less bandwith there is for each device.
IMHO, 5G is not so much about speed as it is about latency and better handling of devices in high density areas.
Regarding the speed aspect, keep in mind that most smartphones (which are the primary 4G connected devices) are not equipped with modems that can reach the speed limits of 4G. They certainly could, but that would kill battery life. I expect something similar with 5G (although one the promises of 5G is lower power consumption). VoIP over 3G is often terrible. It's better on 4G, but, in my experience, it's often hit and miss. Having improved latency and speed means VoIP (and video calls) are, theoretically, less of a gamble.
(My experience with 3G/4G is a single datapoint and should not be taken too seriously, evidently)
However, cheap 4G is a good option for areas that have decent cell coverage but poor broadband (I refer to the usual copper lines for DSL). 5G can make the situation better, if only by making 4G cheaper. Deploying 5G means that an operator may have to upgrade their backbone ... which is good for 4G users too.
> 4G, just like 3G before it will get slower over time.
You are correct but that will happen again with 5G and then with 6G and so on. After a period all networks will saturate.
I'm not sure if I'm right about this, but I think one solution could be to increase the network density with the deployment of small cell networks that provide a better local coverage and bandwitdh. A few companies like nokia [1] and ericsson [2] are taking that route.That also requires upgradation on hardware form the operator but at least spares the customer from buying a new equipment.
One of the features of 5G is support for high-frequency (30 GHz+), high-bandwidth, small cell networks. Most(?) of the 5G deployments are planned to be of this type.
> Most(?) of the 5G deployments are planned to be of this type.
I am a software researcher in the field and I do not think this is the case. Most 5G deployments for the foreseeable future will be on 3.5Ghz. I do not think mmWave (30Ghz+) has been accepted for commercial use in any country. In fact, in many roadmaps mmWave is referred to as 5G NR (new radio), which to my understanding was left for later deployments. To give you an idea why: the mmWave receivers and transmitters (at my current facility) are the size of a door. I think the problem is shrinking those doors to fit your smartphone, but then again, I do not work on the physical layer nor have much insight regarding regulations.
Verizon launched 5G New Radio (Nonstandalone) at 28 GHz with 400 megahertz of TDD spectrum — which doesn’t include the LTE anchor carrier, SRG said. Based on its initial survey, the firm estimated that there are close to 100 5G nodes in downtown Minneapolis, although it had yet to confirm how many of those were on-air. Each node has two Ericsson AIR 5121 5G radios, according to SRG.
How interesting! Thank you for correcting me. In my country, the government never auctioned the mmWave spectrum thus I assumed this to be the case elsewhere. Very excited that Verizon has decided to make the densely deployed infrastructure to work.
But contrary to 3G, saturation of actual, human related client devices should be reached today. I agree that some mangling of frequency bands might be nice to accomodate for high-device densities (metro tunnels during rushhour are bad around here).
What I personally don't get about the whole 5G-craziness is why we (as a society made up of humans in contrast to consumers which fill the pockets of shareholders) need it? Today, we face a number of challenges which all result from our lifestyle requiring an unsustainable amount of ressources/releasing a massive amount of substances (be it fungicides (candida auris up front here recently), antibiotics or CO2).
Why do we "have to" go for artifical, industry-driven growth again, when we really should focus on increasing the efficiency (or even forgo implementation of ressource-using technology)? And 5G will entail a massive increase in power-consumption (more bandwith), the number of cell-"towers" [most frequencies applicable to WANs are already utilized – a lot of the promise of increased network performance now lays on microcells (e.g. every bus stop get's a basestation)] [1] and requirements on the network-clients (why stop at low-latency, if we can sell you 4K-video calls for your 8K-display...).
As for the "health effects": I believe that for classic networks the effects are negligible (though it's hard to reliably do studies on this. It's like with Dieselgate and the health issues...). What happens on the long term if you move around a city where every surveillance camera has a wideband (think radar and microwaves), 5-10W transmitter, beamforming that power to the receiving device unaware of any obstructions such as various bodyparts, which are definitely affected. I guess this is really something you should study (even industry agrees [2]). BEFORE DEPLOYMENT. Additionally the whole beamforming stuff with microwaves opens up really interesting possibilities: how about hacking your surveillance cameras+the basestation and then frying the eyes of some commuters sitting idly around. And with most of the devices operating completely on software and increasingly being single sourced, such stunts are becoming relatively easy to pull of.
With 5G latencies, you can remote control more things (like excavators). Which means less need for humans to be physically present, which means less transportation (read: cars), which means less pollution.
Looking at the bigger picture, and counting in energy savings innovations on the basestation/network level, and so on, it might not be a clear-cut "5G spends more energy".
I think you're a victim of the fallacy of eternal growth thaught for years by capitalist and communist economists alike (and even picked up by most green movements around the globe). If you realize that our consumption is way above it's sustainable limit, the only way to prove that we have really evolved from the barbarism of a pack of wolves is to try everything possible to fold back consumption into this limit.
And since we start crossing some irreversibility thresholds, this means acting now. So we should start cutting consumption and innovate existing technologies so that they become more efficient, instead of increasing consumption and hoping (which roots back to religion – it's kind of interesting that in a time of the decline of classic, philosophical religions, most of the people have adopted blind trust into technology, which does not recognise hardship or offer any consolence in it) for some random technological breakthrough (which would then need years to be adapted on scale – of course we can still search (R&D is not that big of a polluter (except for nukes))). I really would like to see some calculations for "the bigger picture", which show that 5G and the entailing consumption frenzy will bring us nearer to a sustainable society.
Practically for remote-controlled exvacators: why can't you just put a remote control-terminal ontop of the next fibre-"hub"? 5G (or at least the part, where you build small cells with high-frequency-bands) won't be deployed in Alaska anytime soon and this is something which you can easily add on todays infrastructure once you realize that it's actually beneficial. Maybe you should also take a step back on exvacation – with steel and concrete making up about 15% of carbon-dioxide emissions, I doubt that reducing transportation for construction workers (in industrialized countries, I doubt that any construction "worker" in China or Arabia has a car...) has anywhere near the same impact as a 5% reduction in construction.
"innovating existing technologies so that they become more efficient"
But that is what 5G basically is, no?
And no, I don't think I'm a "victim of the fallacy of eternal growth". System-wise, any system that relies solely on continuing growth to keep itself going is certainly brittle and will start to contract or collapse once the prerequisites of increased growth are disturbed, or removed.
Furthermore, I don't think it is meaningful to abandon technological advancement just because some people think that people expect a global climate change deus ex machina from a university or corporate lab.
On the contrary, technology can really help, and I don't mean this in a blindly religious sense. We need solutions which scale and we don't currently have them. The solutions won't appear out of thin air or by magical thinking, they have to be willed out of the laws of physics and chemistry and mathematics and so on.
A good example is technology for capturing carbon dioxide at a price of under 100 USD a tonne. Add Fischer-Tropsch to that and you have fuel.
The slight problem is that the system which produces these advancements and, more importantly, can scale them to planet-wide scales is precisely the system that feeds on "eternal growth". If one disturbs or destroys that system, possible beneficial solutions won't be able to spread to all corners of the planet, thereby hindering the adoption of an innovation that takes non-trivial components to build.
To get out of that dilemma, the system must be transformed. Decentralization and distribution of for example manufacturing is required: once it's possible to print a functioning solar panel in your garage and use it to power your house, we're heading in the right direction.
Also, it's not just one dimension of waiting for technological advancements. "Reduce consumption", farm your own food, use your computer only on weekends, never fly anywhere, these will also work.
Many people hold their phone much closer to their face than a TV or regular monitor. Screen size is irrelvant, what's important is how much of your field of vision is taken up by the screen. I would argue phones are even the device where 4k and 8k make the most sense because of how close you can get to them without effort.
> Many people hold their phone much closer to their face than a TV or regular monitor. Screen size is irrelvant, what's important is how much of your field of vision is taken up by the screen.
This makes logical sense, but isn't the case in my experience. Many games look noticeably better on my Switch's 720p screen than on my larger 1080p monitor, despite running at native resolution (720p handheld vs 1080p docked) on each.
This whole nonsense just makes me irrationally angry. It’s a serious education issue we have with the absolute basics of electromagnetism. It’s just magic to most people and so they treat it with pure superstition.
There are plenty of scientists asking for more testing and international coordination regarding the guidelines as to what EM levels and frequencies can be considered "safe" for humans. Given he fact that our activity in these areas constantly increases, it is a prudent approach, even if you could call it conservative. If we adopted the same approach in other areas, we could have saved lives. I'm not saying EM radiation is like lead or asbestos, but vehement negation of certain documented risks and aggressive lobbying by the industry makes me wonder what our - as a humanity - priorities should be.
And the equivalent idea applied to vaccines gets us measles outbreaks.
Anyone can "Just Ask Questions" about anything: You don't need to know anything, you don't need to have a coherent theory of your own, you just need to bury the people trying to do something in questions which can be answered by a simple review of what's already known.
There's a lot of anti-cell phone radiation cranks, but to compare the research to anti-vaxxers is disingenuous. Mainstream publications have raised legitimate questions about it and the research is far from conclusive:
The problem is that I haven’t seen safety studies, and the null hypothesis is that a technology is mildly unsafe: most of the neat science technologies have been.
The reasoning of “its not ionizing radiation so it can’t possibly impact biological systems at continuous low, structured doses!” wouldn’t pass in an advanced high school class — so it’s deeply concerning that’s what underlies the safety of a widespread technology.
Given the ridiculous complexity of our biological systems, it would be of course very naive to assume that there's no interaction. But nearly everything in our environment interacts with our biology. And for almost all of those interactions it's very hard to specify what exactly the effects are. Depending on which lens you study it through, you can arrive at a nearly random conclusion, if you even manage to get a "statistically significant" result through all the noise a biological system generates.
And that last point highlights one of the major gripes I have with research of this kind. "Statistically significant" does not mean what you think it means. A lot of people see it as a license to draw conclusions from a set of numbers, which it isn't. Remember that even the standard p-test has an absurdly high cut-off of 5% chance that the data is pure randomness. And even then, even if some divine oracle rejects your null, you still have to deal with the fact that intrinsic error in research is still pretty much impossible to quantify. There's a reason that in particle physics they don't consider something truly proven unless there's a five-sigma confidence.
The fact that so many of these health studies show no hope of ever reaching a five-sigma confidence interval, only confidently proves one thing to me: whatever harmful or benevolent effect it is they're studying, its harm or benefit isn't going to be significant. Biological systems are just too unpredictable to make sweeping statements about the harm or benefit of many, many things. Even ionising radiation, the one thing we can all agree is super harmful in significant doses, becomes equally harmless in background-level doses.
So in the absence of reliability of single studies on cell phone radiation harm, I have to fall back on the next best thing: meta studies. And given that the overwhelming majority of research fails to establish a link, and the significance argument I made earlier, makes me very carefree and comfortable about the phone that sleeps right next to my head every day.
Can you show any quality meta-studies which investigate the issue?
I’m unaware of any research into the effects of long term exposure to structured non-ionizing radiation.
A meta-analysis of situations in which people make arguments like yours shows that they’re often problematic: pesticides, plastics, pharmaceuticals, etc. All of these have understated first order effects which have been masked by questionable research and fallacious arguments, and ecologically devastating second order effects which weren’t accounted for until decades later.
I think it’s telling you made ad hominems, like implying I don’t know statistics, but didn’t bother to cite these meta-analysises that support your position and refute mine.
> And the equivalent idea applied to vaccines gets us measles outbreaks.
Not at all. Vaccines have been proved to work not even for decades but centuries, and they're extremely efficient. Moreover, as with all drugs, nobody denies there are risks and side effects, and that people from risk groups shouldn't take them. That's very far from a blatant "all non-ionizing EM radiation is 100% safe for humans" that some people believe. I myself am agnostic as I read studies supporting the views of both camps. Therefore I think the scientist who signed the above call have every reason to call for more research and global cooperation as to defining what safe really means.
Those guidelines are all about the heating effects of microwave radiation on flesh, the same way that an animal placed in a microwave oven would be injured or killed. And the FCC has established a limit for exposure of 1.6 W/kg where we can be sure that you aren't anywhere near having parts of you cooked.
Sufficiently intense microwave exposure can be a health hazard but there's nothing subtle about it, like there is with ionizing radiation which can make you sick days or weeks after exposure or give you cancer.
For 5G in particular the radio waves will tend to not penetrate as far into you body. Some militarizes have actually developed non-lethal crowd control weapons that cause a burning sensation in the victims' skins with the same sort of ~100GHz waves used by 5G but at a much, much higher power than the FCC would allow for consumer devices.
Is that 1.6W per kg of exposed tissue or for the whole critter (e.g. 160W for a 100kg manbeast)?
I put my hand on an antenna coupling plate for one of those through the glass CB antennas, and keyed the mic. This CB transmitted at 4W. It truly felt like someone heated the tip of a dagger and stabbed the palm of my hand with it. Unbelievably painful.
I feel it's pretty obviously per exposed tissue. It's not so much that your mass affects your resistance to it, but that the radiation needs a certain density to cook your hands.
I wonder how they determine how much energy is absorbed. In my example above, CB radio operates at ~27MHz. Most folks would say that’s going to pass right through, but damn if it didn’t cook me.
Try sleeping for a week with your cell phone on airplane mode and your wifi unplugged. It certainly won't kill you but it causes oxidative stress on your cells. 5G just ups the intensity to 11.
What you're saying has quite literally no basis in fact.
Counter to it significantly, there's a heap more powerful non-ionizing transmission than things you have locally in very similar bands, like hundreds of kilowatt TV and FM radio transmitters. Any "effect" you would be seeing is placebo or nocebo depending on the state of your "airplane mode" switch.
Presumably, offer a sense of relaxation and peace - mostly through a combination of the placebo effect and not spending so much time looking at the internet, I guess!
This is a prime example of confirmation bias, you think it's having a positive effect therefore it's having a positive effect. It's a sugar pill.
This nonsense is no better than anti-vax parents that believe because two kids at her children's school were diagnosed with autism and had vaccines that it must mean vaccines cause autism.
If you're going to make claims like this, at least provide some evidence otherwise it's not constructive to make such claims.
have you also tried to blind-test standing beside one that's switched off and on?
Because plenty of people say they can "feel" cellphone radiation (so-called electrosensitivity), yet noone has ever been able to show this under controlled scientific conditions. As soon as they don't know if the radiation is there they stop feeling it.
This sort of thing happens quite a bit actually. In this case, a huge number of residents complained ofvarious illnesses that were supposed to have been caused by a new tower being built in their vicinity. That the symptoms were presented when the tower was not operational is fairly telling that nocebo effect dominates here over any rational or explainable occurrence.
Indeed. My point was that taking claims about effects from people is effectively worthless in a situation where the "threat" is invisible, effects are subjective, and there's a lot of political motivation for belief in them. In a small city nearby people claimed these sorts of effects in an attempt to prevent a cellphone tower being built and "ruining" their view.
Similar to the studies done on infrasound, which seems to bother residents living near wind farms. The studies show that the biggest indicator of whether you're affected by infrasound is if you're told there is infrasound being emitted...
Studies show eggs are healthy. Now studies say they aren’t. Science is difficult and often gets impacted by market forces. Perhaps this is even more of a concern with psychological research such as the studies you are referring to.
The problem here is that the media wants simplistic answers as "healthy or not healthy" but studies don't have such conclusions. What studies find out is "eggs increase X and decrease the probability of Y happening". This is not about science being difficult but an understanding of the outcomes being difficult.
This is also how some people try to discredit science. For example, I was highly irritated by Dilbert's creator's argument on defending Trump's climate policies, he said something about swimming after eating previously deemed hazardous but now declared safe, therefore you can't trust experts.
If you can't reproduce something through randomized control trials, then you should at the very least be very skeptical about it and not pass legislation purely based on people's views.
That's not really the question though. If you have someone eat food contaminated with lead or mercury, they may not be able to taste the difference, but that doesn't mean it's harmless.
The question isn't whether you can immediately sense its presence, the question is the effects of sustained exposure.
And the fact that the placebo effect is a real thing doesn't really tell you that one way or the other.
> Except we're specifically replying to a comment from someone claiming they could feel 5G.
By standing next to the tower. That is a known effect from high power radio transmitters. You can feel that because it's starting to cook you the same way a microwave oven does, to varying degrees depending on the transmitter power. If you stand too close to a large military RADAR transmitter it can kill you dead on the spot.
Then the response is referring to studies done at the power levels of an individual cell phone, and no surprise it's difficult to feel that. But the effects of long term exposure are a different matter.
Moreover, with 5G they're increasing the density of the towers, which implies building towers with closer proximity to people.
> the question is the effects of sustained exposure.
There's been tons of studies on this. All (reputable ones[0]) indicate that there is no danger.
[0] I specify reputable because there are some pretty shady studies. Shady because: results can't be reproduced; exposures given are many orders of magnitude above what a person would receive; suspicious funding; non-reputable journals; etc
A lot of the "reputable ones" were funded by the industry.
The truth is this is very hard to measure. You have something that happens over a period of years and is difficult to control for. How do you find a group of people in modern times who haven't used cell phones in the last decade, but at the same time are not a group of monks or Amish people with so many other lifestyle differences that everything is hopelessly confounded?
Being hard to measure isn't the same as not existing. The question is, what choice do you make when it's hard to get good information? Build a lot more radio transmitters that may or may not be a major contributor to the modern trend of increasing cancer rates, or prefer wired networks that don't?
We don't need to study how specific complex tech affects humans if we know how radiation does in general, what energies are needed to penetrate the skin, etc. There is pretty much no reason to study 5g tech specifically.
> A lot of the "reputable ones" were funded by the industry.
This just tells me you're looking for conspiracy and distrust.
To comment implying that there's no way to measure, you definitely can. You look at cancer rates over time (we have that data). You also look to see if there are correlations with growth in areas where cell phone usage increased faster than in areas that were slow to adopt (this even happens in America, and we have this data). For example, New York more quickly adopted cell phones (and other radio technology) than Montana.
Just because you can't figure out how to measure something doesn't mean it isn't an already well established practice that has been verified through many different studies. Many different disciplines use this method as well. The nice thing about this method is that it is also easy to test to see if researchers are p-hacking or doing other types of data manipulation that one would expect if there was a conspiracy going on.
> This just tells me you're looking for conspiracy and distrust.
Industry funded research, for all industries, is inherently unreliable because they get to choose whether to publish it after they've seen the results. This is not a conspiracy, it's just what actually happens. They're generally not going to publish a finding that hurts their business or exposes them to litigation.
> You look at cancer rates over time (we have that data). You also look to see if there are correlations with growth in areas where cell phone usage increased faster than in areas that were slow to adopt (this even happens in America, and we have this data). For example, New York more quickly adopted cell phones (and other radio technology) than Montana.
At which point you're back to different lifestyles and many confounders.
Worse, availability of mobile phones affects human behavior directly, so you have to somehow account for the consequences of those behavioral changes that directly correlate with mobile usage.
Doing this properly is hard. So hard that people generally screw it up at least a little bit. Then we get studies showing both positive and negative results, but they're all flawed in at least minor ways so everybody gets to point to the flaws in the studies whose result they didn't like.
See also: Replication crisis.
In practice the result is that we don't actually know the answer, so the question is what we should do when we're not sure.
Ahhhh, the replication crisis. You know that isn't true in every field, right? Plus, the exact thing we're talking about HAS been replicated. Many times. Talk to a scientist about the replication scientist. Talk to ones in different fields. You'll see different responses. Correlation between the softer and harder. I'll admit particle physics has replication problems, but that's for different reasons (machines) than psychology (lots of reasons). Some fields require what would be equivalent to p values of far far less than 0.05. When we get multiple experiments agreeing when chance of coincidence is one in ten million, we tend to think that's good.
Also you're confounding the experiment. You can't do this just over New York and Montana. You do it over a lot of places. Over many countries. Plus we have other ways to test this. You can look to see if radio waves heat tissue. The fact is cell phone radiation (radio waves) are non-ionizing and unless you turn the power WAY WAY up, it isn't dangerous. Both these methods are well established and we know what we're doing. So after just these two (there's been others) we have two experiments that match our current theory.
I want to repeat that. Experiments are fitting our theory. Not hypothesis. Theory. We've been studying electromagnetism for a long time. We've been studying radio for a long time. The data is matching well established theories.
This is completely different than your jellybean case because that doesn't match any good hypothesis. There's no underlining reasoning for why only a green jellybean causes acne. That doesn't deny the jellybean correlation, but that's all it is at that point. Correlation. Which is different than causation. To graduate to causation (which is actually the thing being pointed out in that xkcd) you need to give reasoning. There are plenty of things that correlate that don't cause. [0] That's where theory comes in. But if you can't establish a good link, then you just have [0] and people laughing at you.
Tldr: go talk to scientists.
tldrr: you aren't smarter than domain experts (in their domain)
tldrrr: don't shout replication crisis when the issue we're talking about has been replicated with similar results with multile well established methods.
I don't just feel cell phone radiation, it has a visible effect on my body. If I'm carrying a cell in my pocket or near my legs, some of the muscles (I believe it's the muscles) in my legs will begin to vibrate, as though they are having spasms. This happens very frequently when I have my mobile data turned on and the phone near my legs. When mobile data is off, it doesn't happen. I'd be happy to show anyone this effect any time. I guess I could make a video. The effect is very reproducible.
I’m not saying I don’t beleive you; just that I don’t think anyone has ever actually repusproduced cell phone sensitivity (detection) in a controlled environment.
Please don't say "just" in your head. It's implying that psychological conditions aren't as significant or real as physical ones. They are very real and need to be treated just like anything else.
Yes... but when the discussion is DONT MAKE 5G because someone may have a condition in their head, you see the difference between your point and the topic at hand right?
I will say it's "just in your head", because it is. Some person's mental illness shouldn't be a reason the rest can't build wind farms, vaccinate people or build 5G substations.
I'm not saying we should allow pseudoscience. I mean the individuals should be treated with respect and their maladies should be treated seriously. That's independent of taking their claims as truth.
"How would you know if it's just in your head?"
Well, I suppose I wouldn't? I'd be interested to hear how a placebo effect could cause muscle spams, but I have certainly heard of things more strange.
I monitor my muscle spasms (and the rest of my body for that matter) fairly closely. The spasms don't happen often, maybe once a month or two (at most? Not sure... it's rare..) if I'm not carrying a cell in pocket with the data connection on.
If that were actually true, it would be an incredible medical discovery.
The muscles in your legs that are effected, are they biological muscles? Your legs aren't the artificial limbs your username is referring to, are they? Your story is much more plausible if your legs are artificial.
Having lived in Brussels for a year now and witnessing sidewalks covered in trash and bad air quality I’m quite cynical of politicians waxing lyrical about protecting their constituent’s health. I think the last paragraph in that article holds more weight.
“Last week, the various governments in Belgium once again failed to reach agreement on the auctioning of the 5G licences. The file remains stuck on the distribution of the proceeds. It will be up to the next government to handle the proposal, said Telecom Minister Philippe De Backer (Open VLD) last week.“
No, but it seems like they might be neglecting issues that are affecting their constituents health (potentially easy to fix by the sounds of it) and focusing on the current fashionable moral panic.
Well, that's up to voters to decide. Maybe Brusellians don't mind some trash on the streets as much as new tech's potential hazards. It's not too long ago since establishing a link between cancer and EM Radiation[0].
You say that it's fashionable moral panic but some people may say that an increase in cancer is not worth fashionable network tech investment.
Just as you might think that this 5G thingy is a must have and totally safe, some people might think that 4G works just fine so let's not risk it.
People say a lot of things and people are not perfect, they are susceptible to bias and manipulation. So until someone provides some peer reviewed evidence showing that there is a causal link between radio waves emitted by cellular equipment and cancer diagnosis then I'm going to call it a moral panic.
On another note, I would be open to the possibility that Satan is real and is the cause behind cancer if and only if the proper evidence is provided.
That’s OK as long as you don’t stage a coup to install 5G network, launch a smear campaign to discredit public figures, create a violent terrorist organization, build a lair and orchestrate covert take over of the institutions that deal with the issue :)
The history of environmental illness epidemics is chock full of people in power with this attitude. A new technology is poorly understood technology. The lack of peer reviewed research does not prove that it's safe, either.
I'm going to need some citations there, you're saying the effects of radio waves on the human body is a subject that hasn't received much attention despite being heavily scrutinized since radio communications become a thing. The cancer scare from radio waves has being going on for significantly longer than you seem to realise and yet has yielded no evidence to suggest there is a casual link between radio wave exposure and cancer.
How much longer will you bash your head against the wall hoping it will get results?
I have no problem studying the effects of new products and technologies before being released to the general public. After all, I like knowing my drugs aren't likely to harm me. The difference here is radio wave exposure has being a subject studied to death and nothing of note has being found. Simply because you believe something to be true or could be true does not award you the right to make the assertion that it's true. Go get the evidence and bring something new to the table instead of torturing everyone involved with this nonsense.
I think radio communications have been heavily scrutinized, but there is a lack of peer-reviewed well-funded research regarding more controversial hypotheses, like their effect on Voltage Gated Calcium Channels. There's also been research that suggests DNA strand breaks do occur from non-ionizing radiation that has been suppressed, and other hypotheses as well that have not been studied extensively.
Also, I'm not just talking about cancer.
There is research from both the "it's safe" and "it's dangerous" perspectives. However, the "it's dangerous" perspective gets almost no funding despite being scientifically sound and published by scientists who used to be respected before they dared question EMF safety.
I have no doubts that current levels of EMF do not cause major issues in the majority of people. Our bodies have several evolved mechanisms to handle it. But I think it is very plausible that a minority of the population with other toxic burdens could be sensitive to it. There is an entire population of people migrating to rural areas just to avoid EMF so they feel better. I don't think they are making this up. It's a HUGE life change to do that, and no one would do that unless they had no other options.
I find the VGCC work of Martin Pall very compelling, but I do not have links on hand, as EMF is not something a spend a lot of time focusing on. Googling him will bring up plenty of info, but you will probably have to dig a bit to find his published scientific work rather than just interviews on holistic websites.
I agree with you about the fallacy, but what I really want to see is good evidence on the alleged health effects. I don't want to rely on the average voter's perception of risk at all.
No, I just need to separate questions of truth from questions of preference.
I am a proponent of representative democracy, of checks and balances, and of democratic institutions that carefully examine problems making good use of all the expertise available.
I think you should choose between not relying on average voters' perception of something and democracy because democracy is a popularity contest targeting the average voters who will choose their representatives according tho their perception of wildly diverse topics where even the best one cannot be well versed on more then few of those.
That's exactly why the role of democratic representatives cannot simply be to reflect people's feelings on individual issues.
Representing people is a two way street. It also means for politicians to tell people the truth and to convince them of supporting the right thing having considered all the evidence, trade-offs and shared goals.
Democratic institutions have a lot of resources available to them and a lot of time that the average voter does not have. They should make use of those resources, not lazily ape voters and exploit possibly irrational fears.
I don't disagree on "how it should be" but there are no mechanics to enforce anything other than popularity and you don't get popular by saying things that people don't want to hear. That's how we got our bubbles in social media anyway.
I guess if you still want to keep the democracy and have your 5G in Brussels you better convince enough Brusselians that the speed increase in networking is worth risking more cancer or that EM radiation definitely does not increase health risk.
Representative democracy, independent institutions (courts, central banks, etc), the rule of law, the constitution, international treaties, human rights, crime/rioting/revolution, and most of all the truth are all "mechanics" that put a break on making every single issue a simple popularity contest.
But when I said that I didn't want to rely on average voters' risk percpetion, I didn't actually mean any of that. I merely meant that I don't rely on it to form my own opinion (which is definitely not subject to a popularity contest).
I don't want to convince the people of Brussels of anything. I want to know the truth about the health effects of 5G, and I hope that our democracies are not too dysfunctional to let that truth inform any regulations.
You need to wait 30 or more years for the truth. Any effects if any will be highly non-linear and chronic exposure may be harmful only if one experience it for many years.
What you're talking about is uncertainty, not truth.
If we don't know anything about the effects of 5G, it could just as well be the cure for cancer.
But it's not a coin toss. We do know some things about how it works, we have decades of empirical data on similar technologies, and ultimately we always have to act in spite of uncertainty as even the effects of doing nothing are uncertain.
As I understand it, Brussels is governed by a parliamentary system, not a direct democracy. The advantage of such a system, in theory, is that these representatives can have cooler heads than the mob of common rabble outside.
Would you be able to share some scientific research that supports the idea that the proposed antennas are completely, without-a-doubt safe? (I assume that's what you're implying by your statment.)
Edit: ok, forget that I used the words 'completely' and 'without-a-doubt' which causes a knee-jerk reaction amongst the armchair epistomologists here. How about just evidence in general that suggests that they're safe?
edit edit: my apology if the phrase 'knee-jerk reaction amongst the armchair epistomologists' rubbed anyone the wrong way. just being snarky but perhaps wasn't helpful to the conversation.
I'm open to the possibility they're not safe if and only if the proper evidence is provided. As it stands, no peer reviewed evidence has being provided to show that there is a casual link between radio waves emitted by cellular equipment and cancer diagnosis.
I'm not proposing our default position should be to assume safety until proven otherwise. I'm proposing that if one wishes to claim something is not safe which is counter to existing scientific literature then one needs to provide the proper evidence. I'm not willing to easily discard existing literature on the basis of what someone said.
Simply because there is examples of things that we thought to be safe but were in-fact harmful does not award you the right to make bold claims without the proper evidence. That would be a very slippery slope. If you believe something to be harmful, go and prove it.
Because we were wrong in the past about some things, I'm going to make the claim without evidence that visible light kills. Everyone who has ever died of cancer was exposed to visible light for very long periods of time. Don't expose yourself!
> Would you be able to share some scientific research that supports the idea that the proposed antennas are completely, without-a-doubt safe?
Can you link to a scientific study that proves anything is completely safe? Ironically more money has been spent proving electromagnetic radiation and vaccines are safe than most naturally occurring substances, because the public is paranoid about those things/it is a "sexy" area of research.
They've literally put animals into cages and exposed them to 1000%+ levels of typical EM exposure, and still not witnessed this supposed cancer link. But science cannot say anything is "completely safe" because that isn't how logical reasoning or the scientific method work. All we can say is that a mechanism of unsafety has yet to be discovered.
guaranteed complete safety is not a goal; it;'s not economic. All the matters is that it is shown to be Safe Enough for the Value it Provides, and nobody has demonstrated it is not safe enough.
In my experience a clean public space tends to stay clean even without outside input, while trash leads to more trash. Apparently people feel more guilty for making a clean place dirty than for making a dirty place a bit dirtier.
Thus a good way to fix trash on the streets is to pay people to clean it up, and after a short while you can get clean streets with a very moderate level of cleaning effort.
When I visited amsterdam I saw little or no trash. After watching a while, I noticed they have guys with little witches brooms cleaning everywhere (it was really interesting to watch, turns out they used to use more modern ones but they don't work as well), followed by street cleaners. The little brooms made all the difference, ferreting out all the half-cloaked garbage dropped by tourists. Seems completely routine and normal and not authoritarian.
Someone should tell politicians about how radio waves propagate and the inverse square law: the cellphone kept in their pocket, very often more than one, expose them to a lot stronger EM fields than any tower they might have nearby.
Or maybe they already know that, but banning or imposing restrictions on cellphones would destroy their careers.
In the EU the technical data of any phone already include a "radiation value" that measures your radiation exposure from using the phone. So regardless of whether this is something to worry about, it's aready covered by existing legislation.
Cellpone towers are also different in that you can't choose not to expose yourself to them. In contrast you can choose not to get a mobile.
> While an increased risk of brain tumors is not established, the increasing use of mobile phones and the lack of data for mobile phone use over time periods longer than 15 years warrant further research of mobile phone use and brain cancer risk. In particular, with the recent popularity of mobile phone use among younger people, and therefore a potentially longer lifetime of exposure, WHO has promoted further research on this group. Several studies investigating potential health effects in children and adolescents are underway.
"The Brussels region has particularly strict radiation standards for telecom applications. The standard of 6 volts per metre has already led to problems in the past with providing fast mobile internet via 4G in the capital."
It looks like there are a couple of disinformation campaigns against cellphone infrastructure and particularly 5G right now. One is aimed at retargeting environmentalists to fight harmless cell towers instead of bothering industry by fighting global warming. The other looks like the usual Russian campaign to slow down the tech progress of other nations. For example there was a widely shared story that a 5G test killed a flock of birds in The Hague, which was completely false (check Snopes).
Also could be coming from competing industries. Like you can find articles from ISP, telco suppliers in their own media pushing propaganda about harmful wifi without even bothering to hide that the whole thing is completely fabricated.
As consumers we don't need it. If it was up to us we would never agree to invest so much into this tech for so little gain.
But all those giant corporations always want to sell you more devices, more expensive services, show you ads faster, track you and spy on you better, make more excuses to raise prices, harm competition, etc.
4G is very patchy in some urban areas and doesn't give quite the speed needed to make it so you don't need Wi-Fi/broadband at home. 5G has a hierarchy of connections at different frequencies to give better coverage.
"Two areas of the body, the eyes and the testes, are particularly vulnerable to RF heating because of the relative lack of available blood flow to dissipate the excess heat load."
We live in a culture where there is an normally an intense focus on the benefits of technology and not really a lot of regard for any of the possible the negatives. I.e. there is a huge bias at a cultural level. I guess this a lot to do with idea that consumerism is the solution when things get difficult in life. If you study history you can see how this normally presents itself - and even effects the science c.f. the smoking industry.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 216 ms ] threadI am willing to change my mind if somebody proves why we need to upgrade but (and as much as I love new tech) "if ain't broken dont touch it", if anything just make it cheaper.
4G sucks at coverage and handset count is nowhere near enough to justify 4G hardware and power consumption in most places.
3G yes, it sort of fell through between 2G and 4G - smaller coverage compared to 2G, smaller data throughput compared to 4G.
I don't have an answer to your question so I'm just speculating over here and it's quite possible that I'm wrong
I think as soon as that happens (someone shuts off a network) someone else will set up new networks to provide the old service.
Open source technologies exist to set up base stations right now [1]
I think we're headed towards an open spectrum future. Soon most communication could take place on unliscenced networks [2]. Or more and more networks could become unliscenced.
The G networks are not the only way to communicate. It is also important to note that the G networks are now simply internet enablers.
I don't have any data on this but I'd love a comparision of telephony and data services on use today. How much data people use in calling vs using Facebook for example?
Also consider that all telephony comapnies are betting big on IOT.How many IOT devices works on a G network?
If you have a modern device all you need is WiFi.
That however does not mean that telephone companies would cease to exist. Someone still has to provide infrastructure. They just won't have to spend so much on acquiring liscence s. Which also means more competition from unliscenced providers.
Device manufacturers would be able to work on a common network technology stack.
By the way I don't have anything against 5g. I also don't quite understand health implications so I'm unqalified to talk about it. But I don't like having to buy a new device just to use a new network.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenBTS
[2]https://www.weforum.org/projects/internet-for-all
I'm not sure which consumers you're worried about here but it's likely not any real consumers.
IMHO, 5G is not so much about speed as it is about latency and better handling of devices in high density areas. Regarding the speed aspect, keep in mind that most smartphones (which are the primary 4G connected devices) are not equipped with modems that can reach the speed limits of 4G. They certainly could, but that would kill battery life. I expect something similar with 5G (although one the promises of 5G is lower power consumption). VoIP over 3G is often terrible. It's better on 4G, but, in my experience, it's often hit and miss. Having improved latency and speed means VoIP (and video calls) are, theoretically, less of a gamble.
(My experience with 3G/4G is a single datapoint and should not be taken too seriously, evidently)
However, cheap 4G is a good option for areas that have decent cell coverage but poor broadband (I refer to the usual copper lines for DSL). 5G can make the situation better, if only by making 4G cheaper. Deploying 5G means that an operator may have to upgrade their backbone ... which is good for 4G users too.
You are correct but that will happen again with 5G and then with 6G and so on. After a period all networks will saturate.
I'm not sure if I'm right about this, but I think one solution could be to increase the network density with the deployment of small cell networks that provide a better local coverage and bandwitdh. A few companies like nokia [1] and ericsson [2] are taking that route.That also requires upgradation on hardware form the operator but at least spares the customer from buying a new equipment.
[1] https://networks.nokia.com/products/small-cells
[2]https://www.ericsson.com/en/networks/offerings/small-cells/o...
I am a software researcher in the field and I do not think this is the case. Most 5G deployments for the foreseeable future will be on 3.5Ghz. I do not think mmWave (30Ghz+) has been accepted for commercial use in any country. In fact, in many roadmaps mmWave is referred to as 5G NR (new radio), which to my understanding was left for later deployments. To give you an idea why: the mmWave receivers and transmitters (at my current facility) are the size of a door. I think the problem is shrinking those doors to fit your smartphone, but then again, I do not work on the physical layer nor have much insight regarding regulations.
RF bands 5G: n261 (27.5-28.35 GHz); n260 (37-40 GHz)
4G: B2, B4, B5, B13, B46, B48, B66
Verizon launched 5G New Radio (Nonstandalone) at 28 GHz with 400 megahertz of TDD spectrum — which doesn’t include the LTE anchor carrier, SRG said. Based on its initial survey, the firm estimated that there are close to 100 5G nodes in downtown Minneapolis, although it had yet to confirm how many of those were on-air. Each node has two Ericsson AIR 5121 5G radios, according to SRG.
https://www.motorola.com/us/products/moto-mods/moto-5g#specs
https://www.rcrwireless.com/20190405/test-and-measurement/pu...
It leaves more spectrum for 4G communications.
What I personally don't get about the whole 5G-craziness is why we (as a society made up of humans in contrast to consumers which fill the pockets of shareholders) need it? Today, we face a number of challenges which all result from our lifestyle requiring an unsustainable amount of ressources/releasing a massive amount of substances (be it fungicides (candida auris up front here recently), antibiotics or CO2).
Why do we "have to" go for artifical, industry-driven growth again, when we really should focus on increasing the efficiency (or even forgo implementation of ressource-using technology)? And 5G will entail a massive increase in power-consumption (more bandwith), the number of cell-"towers" [most frequencies applicable to WANs are already utilized – a lot of the promise of increased network performance now lays on microcells (e.g. every bus stop get's a basestation)] [1] and requirements on the network-clients (why stop at low-latency, if we can sell you 4K-video calls for your 8K-display...).
As for the "health effects": I believe that for classic networks the effects are negligible (though it's hard to reliably do studies on this. It's like with Dieselgate and the health issues...). What happens on the long term if you move around a city where every surveillance camera has a wideband (think radar and microwaves), 5-10W transmitter, beamforming that power to the receiving device unaware of any obstructions such as various bodyparts, which are definitely affected. I guess this is really something you should study (even industry agrees [2]). BEFORE DEPLOYMENT. Additionally the whole beamforming stuff with microwaves opens up really interesting possibilities: how about hacking your surveillance cameras+the basestation and then frying the eyes of some commuters sitting idly around. And with most of the devices operating completely on software and increasingly being single sourced, such stunts are becoming relatively easy to pull of.
[1] https://www.lightreading.com/mobile/5g/power-consumption-5g-... - "sponsored by Cisco Juniper Qualcomm"
[2] https://www.infineon.com/dgdl/Infineon-Health%20Effects%20of...
Looking at the bigger picture, and counting in energy savings innovations on the basestation/network level, and so on, it might not be a clear-cut "5G spends more energy".
I think you're a victim of the fallacy of eternal growth thaught for years by capitalist and communist economists alike (and even picked up by most green movements around the globe). If you realize that our consumption is way above it's sustainable limit, the only way to prove that we have really evolved from the barbarism of a pack of wolves is to try everything possible to fold back consumption into this limit.
And since we start crossing some irreversibility thresholds, this means acting now. So we should start cutting consumption and innovate existing technologies so that they become more efficient, instead of increasing consumption and hoping (which roots back to religion – it's kind of interesting that in a time of the decline of classic, philosophical religions, most of the people have adopted blind trust into technology, which does not recognise hardship or offer any consolence in it) for some random technological breakthrough (which would then need years to be adapted on scale – of course we can still search (R&D is not that big of a polluter (except for nukes))). I really would like to see some calculations for "the bigger picture", which show that 5G and the entailing consumption frenzy will bring us nearer to a sustainable society.
Practically for remote-controlled exvacators: why can't you just put a remote control-terminal ontop of the next fibre-"hub"? 5G (or at least the part, where you build small cells with high-frequency-bands) won't be deployed in Alaska anytime soon and this is something which you can easily add on todays infrastructure once you realize that it's actually beneficial. Maybe you should also take a step back on exvacation – with steel and concrete making up about 15% of carbon-dioxide emissions, I doubt that reducing transportation for construction workers (in industrialized countries, I doubt that any construction "worker" in China or Arabia has a car...) has anywhere near the same impact as a 5% reduction in construction.
But that is what 5G basically is, no?
And no, I don't think I'm a "victim of the fallacy of eternal growth". System-wise, any system that relies solely on continuing growth to keep itself going is certainly brittle and will start to contract or collapse once the prerequisites of increased growth are disturbed, or removed.
Furthermore, I don't think it is meaningful to abandon technological advancement just because some people think that people expect a global climate change deus ex machina from a university or corporate lab.
On the contrary, technology can really help, and I don't mean this in a blindly religious sense. We need solutions which scale and we don't currently have them. The solutions won't appear out of thin air or by magical thinking, they have to be willed out of the laws of physics and chemistry and mathematics and so on.
A good example is technology for capturing carbon dioxide at a price of under 100 USD a tonne. Add Fischer-Tropsch to that and you have fuel.
The slight problem is that the system which produces these advancements and, more importantly, can scale them to planet-wide scales is precisely the system that feeds on "eternal growth". If one disturbs or destroys that system, possible beneficial solutions won't be able to spread to all corners of the planet, thereby hindering the adoption of an innovation that takes non-trivial components to build.
To get out of that dilemma, the system must be transformed. Decentralization and distribution of for example manufacturing is required: once it's possible to print a functioning solar panel in your garage and use it to power your house, we're heading in the right direction.
Also, it's not just one dimension of waiting for technological advancements. "Reduce consumption", farm your own food, use your computer only on weekends, never fly anywhere, these will also work.
https://elisa.fi/kauppa/#!/nettiliittymat/mobiililaajakaista (Finnish)
Edit: looks like DNA's 4G Max plans go up to at least 880Mbps based on users' speedtest results: https://bbs.io-tech.fi/threads/nettiliittymaesi-taemaenhetki... (Finnish - the 15ms+ ones are from 4G)
8k on a mobile device doesn't seem all that logical imho. 720p or 1080p is already pretty good on a tiny screen.
This makes logical sense, but isn't the case in my experience. Many games look noticeably better on my Switch's 720p screen than on my larger 1080p monitor, despite running at native resolution (720p handheld vs 1080p docked) on each.
[0] https://www.5gspaceappeal.org/the-appeal
[1] https://www.change.org/p/p%C3%A9tition-contre-la-5g-et-ses-d...
https://emfscientist.org/index.php/emf-scientist-appeal
There are plenty of scientists asking for more testing and international coordination regarding the guidelines as to what EM levels and frequencies can be considered "safe" for humans. Given he fact that our activity in these areas constantly increases, it is a prudent approach, even if you could call it conservative. If we adopted the same approach in other areas, we could have saved lives. I'm not saying EM radiation is like lead or asbestos, but vehement negation of certain documented risks and aggressive lobbying by the industry makes me wonder what our - as a humanity - priorities should be.
Anyone can "Just Ask Questions" about anything: You don't need to know anything, you don't need to have a coherent theory of your own, you just need to bury the people trying to do something in questions which can be answered by a simple review of what's already known.
https://www.thenation.com/article/how-big-wireless-made-us-t...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/health/cell-phones-cancer...
The reasoning of “its not ionizing radiation so it can’t possibly impact biological systems at continuous low, structured doses!” wouldn’t pass in an advanced high school class — so it’s deeply concerning that’s what underlies the safety of a widespread technology.
And that last point highlights one of the major gripes I have with research of this kind. "Statistically significant" does not mean what you think it means. A lot of people see it as a license to draw conclusions from a set of numbers, which it isn't. Remember that even the standard p-test has an absurdly high cut-off of 5% chance that the data is pure randomness. And even then, even if some divine oracle rejects your null, you still have to deal with the fact that intrinsic error in research is still pretty much impossible to quantify. There's a reason that in particle physics they don't consider something truly proven unless there's a five-sigma confidence.
The fact that so many of these health studies show no hope of ever reaching a five-sigma confidence interval, only confidently proves one thing to me: whatever harmful or benevolent effect it is they're studying, its harm or benefit isn't going to be significant. Biological systems are just too unpredictable to make sweeping statements about the harm or benefit of many, many things. Even ionising radiation, the one thing we can all agree is super harmful in significant doses, becomes equally harmless in background-level doses.
So in the absence of reliability of single studies on cell phone radiation harm, I have to fall back on the next best thing: meta studies. And given that the overwhelming majority of research fails to establish a link, and the significance argument I made earlier, makes me very carefree and comfortable about the phone that sleeps right next to my head every day.
I’m unaware of any research into the effects of long term exposure to structured non-ionizing radiation.
A meta-analysis of situations in which people make arguments like yours shows that they’re often problematic: pesticides, plastics, pharmaceuticals, etc. All of these have understated first order effects which have been masked by questionable research and fallacious arguments, and ecologically devastating second order effects which weren’t accounted for until decades later.
I think it’s telling you made ad hominems, like implying I don’t know statistics, but didn’t bother to cite these meta-analysises that support your position and refute mine.
It doesn’t seem a settled issue, as you portray:
https://journals.lww.com/health-physics/Abstract/2013/12000/...
https://www.saferemr.com/2015/09/recent-research-on-wifi-eff...
Not at all. Vaccines have been proved to work not even for decades but centuries, and they're extremely efficient. Moreover, as with all drugs, nobody denies there are risks and side effects, and that people from risk groups shouldn't take them. That's very far from a blatant "all non-ionizing EM radiation is 100% safe for humans" that some people believe. I myself am agnostic as I read studies supporting the views of both camps. Therefore I think the scientist who signed the above call have every reason to call for more research and global cooperation as to defining what safe really means.
+ https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/wireless-devices-and-he...
+ https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/human-exposure-radio-fr...
Sufficiently intense microwave exposure can be a health hazard but there's nothing subtle about it, like there is with ionizing radiation which can make you sick days or weeks after exposure or give you cancer.
For 5G in particular the radio waves will tend to not penetrate as far into you body. Some militarizes have actually developed non-lethal crowd control weapons that cause a burning sensation in the victims' skins with the same sort of ~100GHz waves used by 5G but at a much, much higher power than the FCC would allow for consumer devices.
I put my hand on an antenna coupling plate for one of those through the glass CB antennas, and keyed the mic. This CB transmitted at 4W. It truly felt like someone heated the tip of a dagger and stabbed the palm of my hand with it. Unbelievably painful.
Counter to it significantly, there's a heap more powerful non-ionizing transmission than things you have locally in very similar bands, like hundreds of kilowatt TV and FM radio transmitters. Any "effect" you would be seeing is placebo or nocebo depending on the state of your "airplane mode" switch.
What is this supposed to do?
This nonsense is no better than anti-vax parents that believe because two kids at her children's school were diagnosed with autism and had vaccines that it must mean vaccines cause autism.
If you're going to make claims like this, at least provide some evidence otherwise it's not constructive to make such claims.
Was this documented during a test or just anecdata?
This sort of thing happens quite a bit actually. In this case, a huge number of residents complained ofvarious illnesses that were supposed to have been caused by a new tower being built in their vicinity. That the symptoms were presented when the tower was not operational is fairly telling that nocebo effect dominates here over any rational or explainable occurrence.
That being said, it does, as 32032141 suggests, tell a fair amount about nocebo effects.
implies that it was documented during a test
The problem here is that the media wants simplistic answers as "healthy or not healthy" but studies don't have such conclusions. What studies find out is "eggs increase X and decrease the probability of Y happening". This is not about science being difficult but an understanding of the outcomes being difficult.
This is also how some people try to discredit science. For example, I was highly irritated by Dilbert's creator's argument on defending Trump's climate policies, he said something about swimming after eating previously deemed hazardous but now declared safe, therefore you can't trust experts.
The question isn't whether you can immediately sense its presence, the question is the effects of sustained exposure.
And the fact that the placebo effect is a real thing doesn't really tell you that one way or the other.
By standing next to the tower. That is a known effect from high power radio transmitters. You can feel that because it's starting to cook you the same way a microwave oven does, to varying degrees depending on the transmitter power. If you stand too close to a large military RADAR transmitter it can kill you dead on the spot.
Then the response is referring to studies done at the power levels of an individual cell phone, and no surprise it's difficult to feel that. But the effects of long term exposure are a different matter.
Moreover, with 5G they're increasing the density of the towers, which implies building towers with closer proximity to people.
There's been tons of studies on this. All (reputable ones[0]) indicate that there is no danger.
[0] I specify reputable because there are some pretty shady studies. Shady because: results can't be reproduced; exposures given are many orders of magnitude above what a person would receive; suspicious funding; non-reputable journals; etc
The truth is this is very hard to measure. You have something that happens over a period of years and is difficult to control for. How do you find a group of people in modern times who haven't used cell phones in the last decade, but at the same time are not a group of monks or Amish people with so many other lifestyle differences that everything is hopelessly confounded?
Being hard to measure isn't the same as not existing. The question is, what choice do you make when it's hard to get good information? Build a lot more radio transmitters that may or may not be a major contributor to the modern trend of increasing cancer rates, or prefer wired networks that don't?
This just tells me you're looking for conspiracy and distrust.
To comment implying that there's no way to measure, you definitely can. You look at cancer rates over time (we have that data). You also look to see if there are correlations with growth in areas where cell phone usage increased faster than in areas that were slow to adopt (this even happens in America, and we have this data). For example, New York more quickly adopted cell phones (and other radio technology) than Montana.
Just because you can't figure out how to measure something doesn't mean it isn't an already well established practice that has been verified through many different studies. Many different disciplines use this method as well. The nice thing about this method is that it is also easy to test to see if researchers are p-hacking or doing other types of data manipulation that one would expect if there was a conspiracy going on.
Industry funded research, for all industries, is inherently unreliable because they get to choose whether to publish it after they've seen the results. This is not a conspiracy, it's just what actually happens. They're generally not going to publish a finding that hurts their business or exposes them to litigation.
And then you're here: https://xkcd.com/882/
> You look at cancer rates over time (we have that data). You also look to see if there are correlations with growth in areas where cell phone usage increased faster than in areas that were slow to adopt (this even happens in America, and we have this data). For example, New York more quickly adopted cell phones (and other radio technology) than Montana.
At which point you're back to different lifestyles and many confounders.
Worse, availability of mobile phones affects human behavior directly, so you have to somehow account for the consequences of those behavioral changes that directly correlate with mobile usage.
Also this: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Doing this properly is hard. So hard that people generally screw it up at least a little bit. Then we get studies showing both positive and negative results, but they're all flawed in at least minor ways so everybody gets to point to the flaws in the studies whose result they didn't like.
See also: Replication crisis.
In practice the result is that we don't actually know the answer, so the question is what we should do when we're not sure.
Also you're confounding the experiment. You can't do this just over New York and Montana. You do it over a lot of places. Over many countries. Plus we have other ways to test this. You can look to see if radio waves heat tissue. The fact is cell phone radiation (radio waves) are non-ionizing and unless you turn the power WAY WAY up, it isn't dangerous. Both these methods are well established and we know what we're doing. So after just these two (there's been others) we have two experiments that match our current theory.
I want to repeat that. Experiments are fitting our theory. Not hypothesis. Theory. We've been studying electromagnetism for a long time. We've been studying radio for a long time. The data is matching well established theories.
This is completely different than your jellybean case because that doesn't match any good hypothesis. There's no underlining reasoning for why only a green jellybean causes acne. That doesn't deny the jellybean correlation, but that's all it is at that point. Correlation. Which is different than causation. To graduate to causation (which is actually the thing being pointed out in that xkcd) you need to give reasoning. There are plenty of things that correlate that don't cause. [0] That's where theory comes in. But if you can't establish a good link, then you just have [0] and people laughing at you.
Tldr: go talk to scientists.
tldrr: you aren't smarter than domain experts (in their domain)
tldrrr: don't shout replication crisis when the issue we're talking about has been replicated with similar results with multile well established methods.
[0] https://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
How would you know if it’s just in your head?
Please don't say "just" in your head. It's implying that psychological conditions aren't as significant or real as physical ones. They are very real and need to be treated just like anything else.
I monitor my muscle spasms (and the rest of my body for that matter) fairly closely. The spasms don't happen often, maybe once a month or two (at most? Not sure... it's rare..) if I'm not carrying a cell in pocket with the data connection on.
The muscles in your legs that are effected, are they biological muscles? Your legs aren't the artificial limbs your username is referring to, are they? Your story is much more plausible if your legs are artificial.
“Last week, the various governments in Belgium once again failed to reach agreement on the auctioning of the 5G licences. The file remains stuck on the distribution of the proceeds. It will be up to the next government to handle the proposal, said Telecom Minister Philippe De Backer (Open VLD) last week.“
You say that it's fashionable moral panic but some people may say that an increase in cancer is not worth fashionable network tech investment.
Just as you might think that this 5G thingy is a must have and totally safe, some people might think that 4G works just fine so let's not risk it.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18355680
On another note, I would be open to the possibility that Satan is real and is the cause behind cancer if and only if the proper evidence is provided.
How much longer will you bash your head against the wall hoping it will get results?
I have no problem studying the effects of new products and technologies before being released to the general public. After all, I like knowing my drugs aren't likely to harm me. The difference here is radio wave exposure has being a subject studied to death and nothing of note has being found. Simply because you believe something to be true or could be true does not award you the right to make the assertion that it's true. Go get the evidence and bring something new to the table instead of torturing everyone involved with this nonsense.
I think radio communications have been heavily scrutinized, but there is a lack of peer-reviewed well-funded research regarding more controversial hypotheses, like their effect on Voltage Gated Calcium Channels. There's also been research that suggests DNA strand breaks do occur from non-ionizing radiation that has been suppressed, and other hypotheses as well that have not been studied extensively.
Also, I'm not just talking about cancer.
There is research from both the "it's safe" and "it's dangerous" perspectives. However, the "it's dangerous" perspective gets almost no funding despite being scientifically sound and published by scientists who used to be respected before they dared question EMF safety.
I have no doubts that current levels of EMF do not cause major issues in the majority of people. Our bodies have several evolved mechanisms to handle it. But I think it is very plausible that a minority of the population with other toxic burdens could be sensitive to it. There is an entire population of people migrating to rural areas just to avoid EMF so they feel better. I don't think they are making this up. It's a HUGE life change to do that, and no one would do that unless they had no other options.
I find the VGCC work of Martin Pall very compelling, but I do not have links on hand, as EMF is not something a spend a lot of time focusing on. Googling him will bring up plenty of info, but you will probably have to dig a bit to find his published scientific work rather than just interviews on holistic websites.
I am a proponent of representative democracy, of checks and balances, and of democratic institutions that carefully examine problems making good use of all the expertise available.
Representing people is a two way street. It also means for politicians to tell people the truth and to convince them of supporting the right thing having considered all the evidence, trade-offs and shared goals.
Democratic institutions have a lot of resources available to them and a lot of time that the average voter does not have. They should make use of those resources, not lazily ape voters and exploit possibly irrational fears.
I guess if you still want to keep the democracy and have your 5G in Brussels you better convince enough Brusselians that the speed increase in networking is worth risking more cancer or that EM radiation definitely does not increase health risk.
But when I said that I didn't want to rely on average voters' risk percpetion, I didn't actually mean any of that. I merely meant that I don't rely on it to form my own opinion (which is definitely not subject to a popularity contest).
I don't want to convince the people of Brussels of anything. I want to know the truth about the health effects of 5G, and I hope that our democracies are not too dysfunctional to let that truth inform any regulations.
If we don't know anything about the effects of 5G, it could just as well be the cure for cancer.
But it's not a coin toss. We do know some things about how it works, we have decades of empirical data on similar technologies, and ultimately we always have to act in spite of uncertainty as even the effects of doing nothing are uncertain.
What's this a reference to? Last I read there was no established link between cancer and EM Radiation[0].
[0] https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/r...
As I understand it, Brussels is governed by a parliamentary system, not a direct democracy. The advantage of such a system, in theory, is that these representatives can have cooler heads than the mob of common rabble outside.
Would you be able to share some scientific research that supports the idea that the proposed antennas are completely, without-a-doubt safe? (I assume that's what you're implying by your statment.)
Edit: ok, forget that I used the words 'completely' and 'without-a-doubt' which causes a knee-jerk reaction amongst the armchair epistomologists here. How about just evidence in general that suggests that they're safe?
edit edit: my apology if the phrase 'knee-jerk reaction amongst the armchair epistomologists' rubbed anyone the wrong way. just being snarky but perhaps wasn't helpful to the conversation.
Painting a wall a novel color is a new, unstudied EM radiation exposure.
("Assume safety and viscously attack anyone who suggests otherwise" has some advantages, though.)
Because we were wrong in the past about some things, I'm going to make the claim without evidence that visible light kills. Everyone who has ever died of cancer was exposed to visible light for very long periods of time. Don't expose yourself!
Can you link to a scientific study that proves anything is completely safe? Ironically more money has been spent proving electromagnetic radiation and vaccines are safe than most naturally occurring substances, because the public is paranoid about those things/it is a "sexy" area of research.
They've literally put animals into cages and exposed them to 1000%+ levels of typical EM exposure, and still not witnessed this supposed cancer link. But science cannot say anything is "completely safe" because that isn't how logical reasoning or the scientific method work. All we can say is that a mechanism of unsafety has yet to be discovered.
Thus a good way to fix trash on the streets is to pay people to clean it up, and after a short while you can get clean streets with a very moderate level of cleaning effort.
Cellpone towers are also different in that you can't choose not to expose yourself to them. In contrast you can choose not to get a mobile.
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/electromagn...
> While an increased risk of brain tumors is not established, the increasing use of mobile phones and the lack of data for mobile phone use over time periods longer than 15 years warrant further research of mobile phone use and brain cancer risk. In particular, with the recent popularity of mobile phone use among younger people, and therefore a potentially longer lifetime of exposure, WHO has promoted further research on this group. Several studies investigating potential health effects in children and adolescents are underway.
On one hand, 6V/m seems like a lot; I haven't been able to find a reliable regulation site. On the other, 20V/m is apparently common (https://www.arpansa.gov.au/understanding-radiation/what-is-r...).
I've seen some (very disturbing) values of 20W/square meter reported. Is this true?
But all those giant corporations always want to sell you more devices, more expensive services, show you ads faster, track you and spy on you better, make more excuses to raise prices, harm competition, etc.
2) The WHO has an article written in 2014 that says:
I'd say that the lack of updates 2 years later is concerning.source: https://www.who.int/en/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/electrom...