I thought the one lesson we all learned from Clippy is that this kind of interruption is more annoying than useful, I guess the new generation of developers have never experienced Clippy?
Also why would I need help when reading a blog post??
>I thought the one lesson we all learned from Clippy is that this kind of interruption is more annoying than useful
It's not about usefulness, not really. It's about engagement and retention - much like newsletter spam and annoying please-subscribe popups, The Metrics always apparently show that they work amazingly compared to a clean page.
I especially love when these things pop up on careers pages. Just demonstrate to me how lazy your programmers are and apply the chatbot to all pages, why don't you?
The scaling of wireless bandwidth is one of the under appreciated technological miracles of the 21st Century.
I wonder: Would even the most ambitious of telecommunications researchers in 1990 have thought it likely that in 2020 we’d be rolling out gigabit wireless speeds to handheld devices over nation-spanning networks?
The scaling of Moore’s Law was clear by then, and certainly fiber optics represented a practical path to near-unlimited wired bandwidth. What were the radio folks thinking at the time?
Probably? There is a fair bit of overlap between cable/fiber and radio in that both are mostly QAM, multichannel based. Radio tends to have a worse SNR and a couple other tricky problems tacked on top.
I still don't really get the point of 5G. It requires so many towers that you're basically building a wired network, but then it requires billions of dollars worth of wireless spectrum in order to get from what amounts to the street in front of your house to inside, even though there are already phone lines and coax going there that could be used. Even for wireless devices, that would get you close enough to use unlicensed spectrum (WiFi) and save billions of dollars worth of licensed spectrum.
The main benefit of cellular is when you're away from WiFi. But unless you're constantly traveling to places without WiFi, you get that from a $20/month plan and the existing cellular network.
The benefit is mostly realized in places where you can expect to see the cost savings trickle down and have very high amounts of data for 25$/month. Which, to be honest, is not North America right now, but that certainly will become a reality in some places.
Large cheap loans from the federal reserve only they have access to and you don't.
Also helps when FRBNY in conjunction with the Tresury dept via state street and blackrock is buying their HY bonds (TMUS US87264AAT25 [Ba3], S US85207UAK16 [B1], CTL US156700BC99 [Ba3], LVLT US527298BF96 [Ba3], VOD US92857WBQ24 [Ba1] for just a few examples, all trading way over par) on you, the taxpayers behalf, on leverage, in the secondary market and thus helping to lower their ongoing borrowing costs.
Yeah, with the house as collateral (assuming one even wants a house) and a knock on their credit rating if they miss a payment they have to pay for 10-30 years… comparable to multi billion $ unsecured debt these folks can get at similar rates at current yields to maturity values for 5-10 years… lol
If you call the bank in advance - especially post Covid - a lot of times they won’t ding your credit for a missed payment. Besides, the two biggest things most people need credit for are home loans and car loans. You can get a car with less than perfect credit or even get a beater for cash.
And yet, somehow, being able to get two collateralized loans for peanuts in value are comparable to being able to get many uncollateralized ones rolled over for years (yes they were junk before covid) for billions…
No gross mis-allocation of resources or moral hazards as far as one eyes can see… surely the companies will use these funds much better this time for capex… lol
Total US mortgage debt and corporate debt are around the same size - roughly $15 trillion each. Mortgage and corporate bondholders have both seen principal losses in recent history. Fed support is pushing down both types of rates, and it’s not obvious to me that one is somehow unfairly pushed down more than the other.
Perhaps you are one of the few who can get an uncollateralized loan for billions to pursue endeavors that cannot pay for themselves and be able to continue to finance it with more uncollateralized debt…
Equity for funding is not the same as a loan or debt on the capital structure, though it does have some overlap because if equity stake has no preferences in the event of compelete loss, it will be as worthless as uncollateralized debt, but, VC funding is far from the notional value of the uncollaterized debt that is allocated to relatively few endeavors out there today…
Perhaps if VC's funded many more things to the same notional as the uncollaterized debt extended globally (not "valuations", not re extending to the same companies after previous funding from the same one), I would agree to degree , if they faced 100% loss of value extended if the endeavors they funded didn't pan out (not considering firesales of assets that may have been used in such endeavors during the bankruptcy/liquidation process).
You only need 5G towers on every street in places where there are many customers. In other places you can place towers less densely. In the places with many customers, you also see lots of revenue.
Hmm yeah that's a bit confusing. I think there are two effects here at play:
* The higher data density of 5G per spectrum allows you to just upgrade towers instead of having to place more dense towers with 4G. This is the "5G is cheaper" point as it allows you to avoid having to build more towers.
* Due to the increase in data demand in some few places places, you'll have to place 5G towers very densely to meet it, more densely than in the age of 4G. Not because of the technology just because it's now a different era where demand has increased even more.
> The higher data density of 5G per spectrum allows you to just upgrade towers instead of having to place more dense towers with 4G. This is the "5G is cheaper" point as it allows you to avoid having to build more towers.
So this seems like only a theoretical possibility since in practice they'll just have faster towers instead of fewer of them.
> Due to the increase in data demand in some few places places, you'll have to place 5G towers very densely to meet it, more densely than in the age of 4G. Not because of the technology just because it's now a different era where demand has increased even more.
For millimeter wave it is because of the technology. Those frequencies don't penetrate as well so regardless of how many users there are or how much bandwidth they're using, the towers have to be closer to the devices which means you need more of them.
> So this seems like only a theoretical possibility since in practice they'll just have faster towers instead of fewer of them.
With constant demand, you can service a higher amount of people with the same tower density thanks to 5G. If the number of customers is increasing, it means you get more money but you only have to upgrade the towers instead of having to put them more densely. That's how it's cheaper.
> For millimeter wave it is because of the technology.
Part of it might be how they're basically using the network upgrade as a chance to deploy new towers jam packed with surveillance equipment and other junk (e.g. San Diego) that other firms / agencies might be interested in and willing to split costs on, and/or throwing subsidies at (costs of which can be conveniently ignored in many conversations).
The answer is you don't have to maintain the network on your own, your users will help you do it for you. One example is this - https://network.mobile.rakuten.co.jp/area/rakuten-casa/ it's a femtocell that is given away for nearly no cost to users and not only boosts network in your own house but also for people living near you.
But then you are reliant on a different carrier and network for yours to work. Most users home routers are garbage for latency and loss sensitive applications, of which voice would qualify.
Not to mention the security implications from both angles. As an end user do you want random cell phone traffic egressing through your network. And that easily opens up the network to cell site spoofing moreso than they already are.
A big reason LTE, GSM, evdo etc were successfull was because the full stack, from the backbone to endpoint/user was managed by the carrier.
Offloading that to home users who actively put routers in between interference sources like windows, fridges, washers/dryers and then tey and extend their signal with repeaters is a questionable goal at best.
> But then you are reliant on a different carrier and network for yours to work.
Why? You could easily enforce a policy that only who use your fiber network at home qualify for these femtocells. Considering that majority of backbone fiber is an oligopoly already, this wouldn't be an issue.
> Most users home routers are garbage for latency and loss sensitive applications, of which voice would qualify.
Do you have any source on this claim? IP network has become just as fast and resiliant as the pure teleco network (reason why 5G is based on IP in the first place). IP calls from Facetime, Google Duo, Skype, Zoom, Whatsapp and others work just as good as regular calls if you have decent coverage. And you can easily implement QoS for calls through your own network, which is what the old 3G/4G tech was already doing.
> And that easily opens up the network to cell site spoofing moreso than they already are
How common is WiFi spoofing in your experience?
> A big reason LTE, GSM, evdo etc were successfull was because the full stack, from the backbone to endpoint/user was managed by the carrier
The reason they had to do that was because IP stack wasn't good enough 2 decades or even a decade ago. Unless you are in a 3rd world country, IP network is just as good as 3G/4G stack today.
> Offloading that to home users who actively put routers in between interference sources like windows, fridges, washers/dryers and then tey and extend their signal with repeaters is a questionable goal at best.
Okay, you might want to revisit that thought couple of years from now :)
Because in most of the country broadband providers and cell varieties are not the same.
There are limited markets where verizon or att offer both broadband and cell service.
And the other big cell carriers don’t have a broadband market.
To your other point. Most gpon modems are arris or some other brand all in ones these days that carry voip converters/cable television and then normal tcpip traffic. They are bought to maximize profits and rental fees and not with packet forwarding in mind. There are acceptable levels of loss and latency on residential networks that don’t generally carry over to campus or business services.
Add in they also run dns, dhcp and firewalling and often some “extra” parental controls and sometimes a vlan for guest access.
It’s not the residnetial customers fault for the placement either. But most demarcs for telco and internet, even in new construction is in a utility room that is generally right next to other utilities. At least in single family homes.
In apartments sure they may be better placed but still often next to the air handler. And give. The range of 5g, the first floor or two is all that matters.
More interesting than 5G is the Amazon's ambitious LEO Project[1], a plan to launch several lower orbit satellites (LEOs) so that plebs can have internet access directly. Will be very useful in dictatorial regimes who censor/control internet in their countries. This will probably render 5G useless.
Communication with satellites requires end devices to have huge antennas. They can maybe be put into cars, but definitely not into phones. Satellites are useful, for those 5% of users that live in so remote areas that you'd have to do a ton of digging to give them fiber, but this myth that they will render 5G or LTE useless is repeated often but wrong.
5G access (non mobile) deliberately supports 'non-terrestrial networks' of which satellites, floating balloons, repeaters on planes etc are part.
Seamless access/mobility and accessibility to maritime, airline, remote satellite phones etc is one of the ways 5G is hoping to sell 'access anywhere' and diversify from just mobile.
Most NTN access is via a terrestrial satellite basestation acting as a gateway into the mobile networks.
I think one day the communication 'transport' will be a worldwide mesh and operator profitability will be solely about business services on top of that.
Already seeing that to some extent with multiple operators sharing towers, radio front haul and spectrum. At the moment its early days of course.
The point is that as more services migrate to higher bands or more spectrum is made available (TV spectrum partially reallocated, 3G is sunset), there is more capacity available for rural locations that need that lower band.
Lots of work on alternatives to fibre for those last few miles e.g. dedicated wireless links to local distribution nodes in villages.
WiFi is rather terrible, and I believe 5G aims to compete with it along with other standards.
I have a 90 sqm two storey house with a detached garage, workshop and quite a bit of land around it and I need 6 WiFi routers to get a signal everywhere, and even then it's spotty and slow.
Sometimes makes me wish I just had a data SIM on all devices and be done with it.
Open source 4g/5G stuff that was posted a while ago looks really nice, but apparently it would be illegal to operate :/
5G is not mainly for consumers like you and me. We are not willing to pay significantly more for the faster speeds, most people are plenty happy with 4G. The big difference with the 4G to 5G transition compared to the previous transitions is not speed, but flexibility.
5G aims to allow for completely new applications that were not possible before, and hoping that's where the money will come from. Ultra-reliable and low latency, and massive machine type communications are two new areas 5G is pushing into. The first will allow applications like self driving cars, remote control with immediate feedback, and combined with the increased speeds, augmented and virtual reality. The second area is for the smart city/home type of applications.
This is all from my digital communications professor with ties to Ericsson, but on a personal note I'd be hype to explore distant places in real time by wearing a vr headset and controlling a drone with a 360° camera and <10ms latency. You could be anywhere in the world and actually interact with the environment with just a 5G enabled headset and a 5G-drone renting app. Racing through an abandoned mall! Drone laser tag in a redwood forest!
Why would 5G be a big deal for self-driving cars? Any self-driving that requires ubiquitous low-latency communication is hopeless. Self-driving is a vision problem, and it has to work in a messy world.
Do human drivers have instant car-to-car communication? No. So why should a self-driving car have it?
Self-driving cars will never happen if the fundamental assumption is that every single vehicle on the road is able to actively communicate like that.
> ...applications like self driving cars, remote control with immediate feedback, and combined with the increased speeds, augmented and virtual reality. The second area is for the smart city/home type of applications.
A blurb like this can be found everywhere where 5G is talked about. It sounds technical and knowledgeable, but it actually makes zero sense whatsoever. Self-driving cars? No. If the fundamental assumption is that every single vehicle everywhere is communicating, that system is fundamentally flawed and will never take off. Remote control? This has been possible for over 100 years. You can literally do that with a spark-gap transmitter, let alone current 4G tech. Immediate feedback? In what context? Augmented and virtual reality? Now you're just blasting buzzwords to sound smart. Come on.
Smart city/home is another common buzzword, but that's actually where the vastly increased capacity of 5G starts to become relevant.
Those are not my words, they're all from my professor and this [1] book, chapter 23. With remote control and immediate feedback I'm talking about closed loop control. Consider industrial automation with image processing done remotely, or immediate visual or tactile feedback to human operators of remote machinery and equipment.
One thing to note is that the frequency bands specified only apply to US 5G. Huawei's 5G spectrum uses a much lower frequencies: Around 3.8GHz. This falls in the mid-range spectrum, which makes it cheaper to deploy, because the waves travel further and you need fewer towers. That is the attraction of Huawei, for most countries (outside of the US).
Isn't the ISM bands at 2.4 and 5.8 GHz? That shouldn't be interfered by 3.8 GHz 5G signals. Is it because of out-of-band intermodulation from 5G signals or because there are parts of the 3.8 GHz spectrum used by medical devices not for wireless networking but for sensing/measurements?
Wifi has been around a long time now. Why can't the hospital devices just use that like everyone else? (Oh except wireless microphones in churches, which are also some special snowflake exceptions for some reason...)
Because everything interferes with WiFi. It’s junk spectrum. You don’t want critical, lifesaving devices operating on the same spectrum as the microwave in the break room.
"Critical, lifesaving" functionality is for the most part hardwired. Some devices use radio over extremely short range (think arm's length), but any radio communications over longer distances are for reporting or something else non-critical.
The millimeter wave stuff is in addition to this for downtown cores, stadiums, etc. 5G modulation itself adds max 15-20% throughput compared to 4G LTE so more spectrum is needed to deliver on the weird promises telcos made.
This doesn't make a lot of sense.. There is no "Huawei 5G spectrum". Huawei equipment has to operate in whatever spectrum regulations exist for the country buying the equipment. Countries (including parts of the US) buy Huawei gear because it's cheap, not because there's any special spectrum benefits.
I would rather say that there will always be limits of our understanding and building equipment for usage in various mediums, even in a vacuum, we're still only probing our theoretical knowledge of null boundary interactions between photons[0].
> For example, a standard cellphone can fit an array of 72 antennas operating on the 39 GHz mmWave band. A similar 72 antenna array in the 700 MHz low-band frequency would be larger than a typical home door.
And what would it cost? In an environment where cellphone sales have been declining for at least 5 years now at least on the high end (all the games Apple has been playing with sales reporting…), which end users will be willing to bear the cost of the device now?
First of all, this is an excellent explanation of 5G that anyone moderately technical can understand. Great article.
That said, do the numbers from the article concern anyone else at all? I'm generally all for progress, but more than 1 million devices per km2? And massive MIMO antenna arrays spraying EM waves in every part of the spectrum from 600 MHz to 50 GHz?
More than a million devices per km2 ~= 3 million devices per square mile. Am I the only one that thinks that's a bit crazy? I don't want everything from my toaster to my door to my water bottle to be transmitting massive amounts of information to who knows where all the time.
More concerning: the antennas. Current regular MIMO 4G towers are 2x2 or 4x4. Already, there are 5G towers installed today that are 128x128. These are planned to be spaced -extremely- densely in cities, and very close to people (on every floor of offices, on lampposts, etc.) This is a necessity due to the spectrum used. And not only that, but they're using new spectrum that hasn't been used before - instead of the MHz to low GHz range we all know and trust, 5G towers will be up to near 50 GHz (!). Especially the fact that millimeter wave/extremely high frequency is normally blocked by everything from drywall to glass, but now we're intentionally aiming massive amounts of EHF waves with hundreds of antennas in a small space.
Call me a luddite, but I'm more and more thinking that we need a high quality longitudinal study about any effects of this kind of stuff before we go from 2x2/4x4 at well known frequencies to putting 128x128 EHF antenna arrays every hundred feet.
I'd be more concerned with the fact that the increased quantity and precision of the antennas allows collection of extremely fine-grained location information.
This is an interesting thought. It wouldn't be more precise than the GPS tracker already in your pocket, but it does open up more info to people other than Google.
Also as a note, regular MIMO (not "massive") wouldn't provide location information as the scattering channel is generally considered random.
Yeah, I've been slightly concerned about those numbers for a while now. I am in the same boat as you; we think radio waves are totally safe, I get that. But the increase in background spectral density & energy is going to be huge. Makes me feel like we should up our certainty levels a bit more first.
Thanks! I'm glad I'm not the only one. And exactly - it's such a massive jump that it deserves a careful look, which it doesn't seem like it really has gotten so far. I'm not saying it's going to give people cancer, but we just don't know what it may or may not do. Maybe there are absolutely no side effects. Maybe it's even beneficial to health! Hell, exposure to enough EM radiation in the hundreds of nanometers range is actually a requirement for human health.
But maybe it has a negative effect on anything from birds to bacteria to humans, and I think it's worth investigating that before we deploy it extremely rapidly in all of the world's cities.
I mean, the #1 post on HN right now is how highly skilled engineers accidentally made the Golden Gate Bridge emit a loud noise that's blanketing the Bay Area. And that's a bridge, which humans have been building for some 20,000 years. And it's made out of one thing - steel - which we generally understand very well.
I really hope there will be no side effects. But the chance that there will scares me a bit. 5G will be rapidly rolled out at enormous, unprecedented scale and density in nearly all the big world cities - and in 2020 most of the world lives in cities.
>> I mean, the #1 post on HN right now is how highly skilled engineers accidentally made the Golden Gate Bridge emit a loud noise that's blanketing the Bay Area.
No it isn't. The engineers knew this sound was going to happen. It was not accidental.
Apparently the noise on the pedestrian path itself is powerful enough that some people report it is literally unbearable while walking in the wind. From what I've read, the engineers only predicted that there would be some amount of hum, not that it would be nearly this loud.
And again, the things involved here are bridges (which humans have been making for some 14,000 years) and wind (familiar to humans for our entire existence.) 5G uses little-studied frequencies around 50 GHz that we really know extremely little about compared to the widely used cm-wave.
I loathe to weigh in on this, but I do think it is worth pointing out that society has often taken a trust but verify approach to other aspects of health. For example, you don't need a credible concern for the testing of new medicines and devices.
Given the financial and health stakes (>$100B & >100M lives) a through animal study and RCT trial doesn't seem unreasonable. You could relatively cheaply raise a few generations of animals on top of a 5G antenna and look at cellular and reproductive toxicity. Following that, you could do a RCT with real/ sham antennae in bedrooms as part of roll-out.
Its unreasonable to insist on studies because there is no plausible mechanism for there to be a significant effect. Emission of radio waves is not a new phenomenon, we understand pretty well the physics behind radio waves and how they interact with matter. Slapping a new marketing term (5G) on them doesnt change anything.
What would you study precisely? Install 5G in one city and look for anything that could possibly go wrong in that city and try to figure out the 100,000 possible confounding factors and assign blame to 5G for anything we couldn't figure out how to explicate?
I would think raising animals on top of the antennas sound analogous to what people would experience given difference in body size and how the inverse square law applies.
Even so I can't imagine this kind of study actually showing anything while wasting multiple years during which we could be moving forward. How about you raise money to fund the study virtually nobody wants to do and if you find something you can watch smugly while everyone tears down towers.
The NIH could cunduct the studies or the FCC could make it a condition of using the frequency. Funding should be a drop in the bucket compared to actual deployment (low millionions for a study vs hundred of billions invested in 5G)
>How about you raise money to fund the study virtually nobody wants to do and if you find something you can watch smugly while everyone tears down towers.
I find this to be a very rude comment. I have no interest in being smug, And honestly don't think it is a high risk. Given the health of hundreds of millions of people, I would like to see some basic confirmatory testing conducted to confirm safety. It is fine if you disagree, but why bother responding if you are just going to make snide comments and be an asshole about it.
Ok, so, for one, you're miss-understanding the MIMO designation, or at least miss-representing it's meaning. 128x128 means that both sender and receiver have 128 antennas. Not that it's an array of 128 * 128 antennas (16384).
Also, the 128x128 5G MIMO deployments I could find were distributed deployments, placing remote radio heads very densely at relevant indoor locations. I assume they're referring to places like large train stations or shopping malls.
Also, regarding the "massive amounts" part: there is little incentive to transmit more than a few hundred mW per channel, just because the mobile device needs to transmit at a similar level anyways, and there are battery and cooling considerations, even neglecting the cost of power amplifiers for these frequencies.
And, the 1 million devices per square kilometer is actually just a dense, standing crowd. It's the average density that can be reached over any sizable area (putting a school class's phones in a box until the end of the lesson would imply some insane density in that box, but there'd be a limit for how many boxes could be arranged into a dense grid).
I understand the MIMO designation, and I am not trying to misrepresent it in my comment. I know that 128x128 is not sixteen thousand (!!!) antennas on one tower, but rather 256, half for rx and half for tx.
That said, two hundred and fifty six antennae on one tower is far, far more (orders of magnitude, plural!) than the typical 2x2 or 4x4 4G towers deployed today. And keep in mind that this is certainly not "just" 256 antennae for one mall, because 5G is blocked by anything thicker than a post-it (the article mentions how future plans include deploying massive MIMO to each floor of a building, as drywall and glass both block many 5G frequencies!)
The reality is that no matter how you want to slice it, 5G means moving from widely spaced 4G towers transmitting at frequencies we have used for around a century to hyper-dense massive deployments of large numbers of antennae transmitting at new and relatively un-studied frequencies. 4G towers are (mostly) kept away from humans getting too close; 5G towers will be on lampposts and on the same floor of your office where someone can touch them.
I'm not saying 5G is inherently bad, or good, I have no idea. I haven't run a longitudinal study, but _neither has anyone else_, and that's what scares me a little. Look, the #1 post on HN right now is how highly trained, expert engineers accidentally made a bridge (one of the oldest human inventions, around for millennia) create an extremely loud eerie noise currently blanketing San Francisco.
And sure, transmit power is low. But it's not just about the power. Today I went out and enjoyed a warming 1000 W/m2 of hundreds of-nm EM radiation all over my body. Then I accidentally looked at the source, which hurt my eyes and disoriented me. Later I played with a device of only 0.01W emitting highly temporally coherent EM radiation. I had to put on safety equipment, because it had the possibility to harm me, including permanently damaging my sight.
I think you misunderstand the concept of directional beamforming. The antennas in question in a phased array are 'elements' that cooperate to steer a more focussed beam in a given direction.
The phone in your pocket when transmitting (whether 3G/4G/5G) is the biggest contribution to your personal health. Not a base station.
I'd be concerned much more about low and mid band that can penetrate much further than high band. I am concerned about high band too (skin surface effects) but know nothing about this and assume work has been done to quantify and assess.
My biggest problem both with 5G hype and those that seek to cast doubt on it is that both sides misrepresent the 'facts' to suit their agenda. Sadly that's true in all walks of life.
I've messed around with radio a bit, so I have some idea of beamforming. Basically, you use interference in the wavefront to your advantage. I am not sure what relevance it has here - at the end of the day, you are still dumping lots of power into new and unknown frequencies in every direction, very close to humans.
I am going to disagree with you that the phone is always the bigger risk. Apparently Huawei 5G base stations are above 11 kilowatts, and these are being rolled out closer to humans than ever before.
Sure, some research has been done, but the vast majority of it has been simply pointing some mm-waves at people for a few hours and checking if they're OK afterwards. I haven't seen anything for babies (baby skin is thin enough that mm-waves can go through the dermis, unlike adults) and not even a hint of any quality longitudinal study.
And yes, I agree, the 5G hype/hate is so rabid that it makes it much harder to find any actual science on the internet about the subject. Personally, I don't have any agenda here. I was generally positive on 5G until I read the details in this great and informative article, and thought "wow, that's a lot of antennas, and a lot of new frequencies, and they're closer to us than ever before"
If you know of any decent studies on this, I'm all ears - please drop any links.
Assuming we are talking about RF power output here, that is far higher than anything I've ever dealt with, and I'm not sure that it's at all right. A typical macro cell has 20 Watts of RF power output (for example).
The relevant international standards are those from ICNIRP, and they've recently updated and expanded on these in great detail around safety margins of various frequencies.
The UK telecoms regulator, Ofcom, recently did a safety study of actual deployed equipment, looking at measuring the RF output from base stations.
Therefore I'm not sure where figures like 11 kW are coming from. Maybe there are some very hot (and inefficient) early base stations somewhere using 11 kW of mains power to produce 20 or 40 W of RF energy? But considering Huawei is heavily advertising 5G as being "greener", that wouldn't seem likely either. But even then, this is far higher than even the wall socket consumption of the equipment I've dealt with.
Do keep in mind that those ~20 W typically apply to a single MIMO band (so, 10 W +45 deg linear polarization, 10 W -45 deg linear polarization, for a, say, 120 deg wide and 5-20 deg high sector). One eNodeB can have multiple frequency bands, that are aggregated when communicating with a recent high-end smartphone. Of course this restricts deployments where humans can easily walk up to the antenna, but these power levels are only worth it for long-range scenarios.
The 11 kW seem realistic when you take a multi-sector mast that fills 200 MHz TDD with 1W/Mhz in 3 separate 120 deg sectors (600W), at least once you include the compute to handle aggregate data at a realistic maximum spectral efficiency of ~10 (bit/s)/Hz (6 Gbit/s). These power amplifiers are typically between 10 and 40% efficiency.
11kW in the 1GHz-1THz range, in a location where a civilian bystander could accidentally move himself into the beam, isn't going to happen. Not even 1kW.
If you look at a microwave magnetron (don't), you go blind in seconds from your eyeballs getting cooked and turning opaque. Surgery could theoretically replace them (and leave the retina), but I'm not aware of that ever happening.
It's quite feasible for a sizable eNodeB to consume 11kW, but keep in mind that they have significant amounts of compute hardware.
It'd help if you'd make a bit more of an effort to check/validate/cite the concrete numbers you name, if you don't want to be seen as a "confused anti-5G person". I don't think you are malicious, considering your history, but no everyone will.
> Later I played with a device of only 0.01W emitting highly temporally coherent EM radiation. I had to put on safety equipment, because it had the possibility to harm me, including permanently damaging my sight.
Are you talking about a laser? The mechanism of injury is the same as any RF injury -- localized heating. You stick a soldering iron on your retina, you're going to have permanent damage to your vision. The reason you only need a low power to do damage is because the power is spread out over a very small space, because your cells absorb the energy instead of letting it pass through, and because the retinal cells are extremely sensitive to temperature (a 10C increase is apparently all you need to permanently damage them).
> Today I went out and enjoyed a warming 1000 W/m2 of hundreds of-nm EM radiation all over my body.
Skin cancer from exposure to sunlight kills people. UV light has enough energy to rip electrons off of atoms in your body, causing much damage. ("Ionizing radiation.") From physics, we know where the boundary between ionizing light and non-ionizing light lies (in the middle of the UV spectrum). We know ionizing radiation is dangerous -- we understand the mechanism and the effects. (Notice how much safety equipment is involved in getting a dental x-ray. Minimum dose required to get the necessary image. The technician stands in a separate room lined with lead. You wear a lead vest to avoid exposure anywhere that's not needed for the image.)
We also know when ionization stops happening. The energy carried by a photon is directly related to the wavelength of the light, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon_energy. Below the middle of UV, photons don't have enough energy to ionize anything. Thus begins "non-ionizing radiation", which as far as we know, just burns you. You can, of course, die from burns, so it's not harmless. That is how microwaves cook foods -- water absorbs energy from 2.4GHz photons quite well ("dielectric heating"). The RF energy is converted to heat, and makes you a hot meal. But you sure wouldn't want to have your hand in there when it's on.
Anyway, these effects are well understood. Any "5G is harmful" argument needs to propose a new mechanism for causing damage, or show how a known mechanism works at 5G frequencies. You could show that it turns out we were wrong about ionization (experimentally testable). You could show that certain tissues convert all the energy to heat (again experimentally testable).
Sure, there could be a new mechanism for causing damage that only happens at some random location in the EM spectrum not related to any other effects. Someone has to be the first to discover it. Portal 2 has a good quote: "Marie Curie invented the theory of radioactivity, the treatment of radioactivity, and dying of radioactivity."
It seems unlikely, though. You can do an infinite amount of research without discovering something that doesn't exist. People want fast YouTube downloads more than they want a 0% chance of risk. The risk is already so close to zero that it doesn't matter.
> Look, the #1 post on HN right now is how highly trained, expert engineers accidentally made a bridge (one of the oldest human inventions, around for millennia) create an extremely loud eerie noise currently blanketing San Francisco.
I believe they knew it would make a noise. They just didn't think anyone would care.
A deeper problem is that humans are capable of creating much more complicated systems than nature. Ever debug some code and wonder "how did that ever work?" It's just a lot more complex than basic physics, and so there are a lot more unexpected results.
>> Sure, there could be a new mechanism for causing damage that only happens at some random location in the EM spectrum not related to any other effects. It seems unlikely, though.
And there lies the body of your argument.
Now I will disprove it:
- Photochemically-induced retinal injury (NOT tissue heating) by 430nm EM radiation [1]
- Exposure to ~600 THz EM radiation disrupting the circadian rhythm [2]
- Living within 50m of a <100 kHz EM radiation source more than doubles the chance of Alzheimer's disease [3]
The EM spectrum is vast and complex. Deploying unprecedented numbers of towers, each with more antennas, at higher powers than ever before, at new and untested wavelengths [5], strikes me as risky. You may, of course, draw your own conclusion. As with many technological improvements, we may not know the true cost for many years to come.
[5]: from the above article - up to 2 orders of magnitude more antennas per tower, orders of magnitude more towers, power significantly higher than before, and 48 GHz.
> Exposure to ~600 THz EM radiation disrupting the circadian rhythm [2]
You see, if you hadn't switched the units around, this would have been a good example. But I'm failing at searching a way for how this could have been deliberate, yet non-malicious.
Also, 10kHz is something you get with modern power electronics, not RF. Take a look at the way they couple that energy into the subject, and what the power levels are.
Can you please give a concrete citation for the power being "significantly higher than before"?
I am not sure how these signals come from power lines, which is what the study looks at. I would assume those are in the 50-60Hz range. (But we can use that band for communication too! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremely_low_frequency)
Well, keep in mind that the Swiss 50Hz do fall into the <100kHz designation.
I'm aware of it's usage for pinging currently-diving submarines, and in the slightly higher region, providing wireless bidirectional low-bandwidth comms into deep mines. The power lines do have quite some magnetic stray fields, though. Not that it's too massive; it's not more than a few (3~4) kA at most.
Here's a helpful link. HN can be a great place full of interesting people, but you really do have to assume good faith.
Look, I came into this discussion trying to have an intelligent discussion about the possibile risks of 5G. When I opened the article I was somewhat positive about 5G, now I am somewhat negative. I am not some crackpot saying it will damn us to Hell eternally, I'm saying hey, we've messed around with novel parts of the EM spectrum before, why not at least evaluate the risks first? Never before in human history has anyone lived with a mmwave source, and now we are planning to roll them out at unprecedented speed to all the world's cities without a single longitudinal study on the risks.
I've been playing with different ways to represent things partly for fun, and partly as a filter for this discussion. Anyone who can't trivially figure out that 1 Hz ~= a wavelength of 299792 km does not have the knowledge necessary for this discussion.
Tens and hundreds of kHz RF has been created by humans. The first of studies have been coming out in the last decade about its effects. So far, it looks like living within 50m more than doubles your risk of Alzheimer's.
>> Can you please give a concrete citation for the power being "significantly higher than before"?
Sure. Both MTN and Huawei say that just with current systems we're looking at 200-300% of existing levels. And it's their job to make it sound -good-.
That link is talking about total power used by the entire site, not RF power emitted. A lot of that is going into things like additional switching capacity, advanced FPGA and DSP hardware, etc. Also, it is additive on top of older cell technology (look at the graph) - it makes sense that power consumption will go up at a site supporting 2G/3G/4G and 5G, instead of just 2/3G or 2/3/4G.
coming. As I said earlier, I am not assuming bad faith from you in this discussion, but didn't see a good reason for mixing these up. It made me consider whether you might have soaked those numbers from popular media or (worse) echo chambers.
I guess it's just another example for sarcasm/humor causing problems on the internet, but this time making me worry whether you got captured by some echo chamber, instead of making the sarcastic author look like a troll.
And, just to note, I personally try hard to not behave badly on HN, so feel free to assume a misunderstanding instead of me assuming/exhibiting bad faith.
The first two links are about blue light affecting your eyes. Indeed there are many light inputs that affect your eyes. You have to understand that the cells in your eye are uniquely tuned to produce a chemical response to light. That's what seeing is. One also cannot discount the effects of your brain's interpretation of various light sources -- there are lots of horrific images that you can see, but the brain damage doesn't come from a reaction to the energy in the radiation, it's from your interpretation of what you're watching.
The next link suggests an increase in Alzheimer's disease from living near power lines. I am not sure how meaningful the results are; the entire document is caveats on how they selected which data points to use, the field strenghts are vastly different from wireless signals, and the frequency ranges are off by 5 orders of magnitude.
The last link is about a device designed to receive radio signals and apply electrical current to your spinal cord. If the radio waves worked by themselves, why would they implant a receiver?
You latch on to the "large number of antennas" thing, but it's not really a big deal. All the antenna array does is create interference patterns that control the direction of the signal. The antennas are excited with the desired signal with different phase delays, and then the interference results in some spots receiving 0 power (in an ideal case) and another spot receiving all the power. A friend of mine wrote a small simulation you can play with in your browser: https://apenwarr.ca/beamlab/. (The reality is that channel capacity depends on SNR, and while these do increase the signal strength at the receiver, they more importantly reduce the amount of noise that reaches the receiver. It is easier to null out received noise in a certain direction than to transmit power somewhere.)
In the past, we did this with carefully placed antenna elements that receive and re-radiate signals from another antenna element: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yagi%E2%80%93Uda_antenna (among many other designs). Now that DSP has become more powerful, it is possible to do it in software instead of hardware, and get better results. (Phased array radar have existed since the 70s. WiFi and 4G networks also use MIMO.)
I guess my summary continues to be: some sort of mechanism of causing damage will have to be proposed and tested. Maybe things on the very low end are bad (as your study [3] suggests). We know things on the high end are bad (don't get too many x-rays). But those effects roll off, and 5G is in an area where those effects probably don't exist.
Anywhere current flows through a conductor, radio waves follow. We have been using radio for 100 years, and we kind of know how this stuff works. I don't think there is any reason to worry (and many experts in medicine and RF agree with me).
Even though that is indeed a simple, quite trivial example, it does not really apply to the case of 30~50 GHz in combination with significant beamforming, because the average power density deposited into surface tissue can be much higher than with 2.4 GHz. You just can't focus 2.4 GHz onto a square inch (~6.5 cm^2) with a far-field-optimized antenna. According to [0], humans can sense an energy dose of 4J (0.2 K threshold, 5 cm^2 area, 1 cm penetration depth) in their palm due to the temperature rise. Assuming, say, 1 W focused onto the spot, that'd be just 4 seconds until it's perceptible. Measurable, harmful effects at thresholds slightly lower than what's perceptible don't see that far-fetched, once you consider the shallow sub-surface heating.
I don't think there'd be any frequency-dependent effects that don't stem from the interaction of penetration depth, triggered circulation (transporting heat away), and deposited power. Neglecting triggered circulation, it'd seem viable to just test thermally-mediated health effects from focused, 0.01~10 W @ 20~50 GHz (spot size limited due to a reasonable (0.1~0.8) numerical aperture of the beam focusing system) radiation.
> Below the middle of UV, photons don't have enough energy to ionize anything. Thus begins "non-ionizing radiation", which as far as we know, just burns you
Photodissociation is not simply heating. Red light is for example known to affect the mitochondrial electron transport chain
I don't have a study on hand but I expect the effect to be less than lower frequency waves.
First thing to get out of the way, these are not ionizing radiation. Basically, the only thing electromagnetic waves up to visible light can do is heat. UV is borderline.
The question is what they heat. The general idea is that the lower the wavelength, the deeper the penetration. 2/3/4G frequencies will heat your insides, 50 GHz will only heat your skin. Of course the power is so that under normal conditions, the heating is negligible.
As for the effect of millimeter waves, while testing this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Denial_System they subjected people to massive (100kW!) doses of 95 GHz radiation. High enough to actually burn you, and yet, the adverse effects were minimal.
If you are talking about technical problems, like interference, and how to deal with radio waves that are starting to act a bit like light. I guess that 5G is designed by people who know what they are doing. Simply that we are able to make it work is almost like a miracle to me.
Human health would be the first thing on my mind, but there are many other things it could have an effect on - everything from the neighborhood pigeons to trees.
And yes, I am sure that 5G is designed by some brilliant people. Anyone getting that close to the Shannon limit is smarter than me. My hat is off to them.
But the reality is that this stuff just hasn't been trialed in any real way. Sure, the US government found 600 adults to get zapped for a few hours and only injured eight of them. But how about living with it for ten years? What about different frequencies? 100 nm is a world away from 300nm which is a world away from 500nm. Sure, they trialed 95 GHz and it was fine. What about 48 GHz? 25 GHz? All the other frequencies being used? What about with 256 antennae transmitting at higher power than anything before, right next to you, day in and day out for a decade?
One big claim is that all this 5G radiation is blocked by the skin, so we'll all be fine! Oh wait, what about babies? Turns out babies' skin is thin enough that mm waves can penetrate the dermis...
Furthermore, ionizing radiation and heating are not the only two ways EM can harm you. Just look at all the news about blue light for one example! EM radiation in the mm-wave range is still far understudied compared to the cm wave range.
Look, I think that 5G is probably going to be fine, health wise. But for something as big as this, it absolutely deserves at least one good longitudinal study. Of which there have been zero.
The EM spectrums are already nearly full - is that not proof in itself?
On top of that the military uses absolutely enormous energies in their RADARs and there's still little if any evidence of risk even including powers where you might as well have you head in a microwave oven
>> The EM spectrums are already nearly full - is that not proof in itself?
... What? I have no idea what "full" would be, but by any definition they are certainly not. Just a bit of air is enough to attenuate mm waves of even high power. (That's why we need so many towers!) There is not a lot of ionizing radiation out there, that's why we're not all dead (and why x-ray film even works.)
Maybe you're thinking of outer space? But it's not even true there - for an obvious example, visible light, which there is very little of by human standards pretty much everywhere in the universe.
"The military used it for some time and nobody died so let's put it pointing everywhere in our homes and offices" strikes me as a very weak argument for something's safety. As just a simple counterexample for why you cannot use that to demonstrate safety, consider that while mmwaves do not penetrate the adult human dermis, babies' skin is thinner and is easily penetrated by mmwaves.
This is a 2.5MW Phased Array. If there was any provable health risks to these (there are ~10 of them in the west) we would know - there have been suspicions, but they have been investigated and no evidence has been found.
Why do we care about microwaves in particular when there are huge installations like these operating at much longer wavelengths which as you say penetrate further?
If there was immediate danger from electromagnetic radiation it would have been observed years ago - powerful microwave emitters have been in use in very proximity to humans since the second world war (Randall and Boot developed their magnetron in 1940)
I have quite a few of the papers that 5G nuts cite, and they are not convincing in this slightest - there is not a single paper that is both dealing with radiation within FCC limits, on animal test subjects, and have any macroscopic threat to health. This also doesn't include the issue that these papers are usually reports of fairly limited research so there is no discussion of the relative risk of their findings if there are any at all (Historical Evidence as mentioned previously sets an upper bound on that risk too).
>> The electromagnetic spectrum is in use pretty much everywhere someone can build a radio to operate on that frequency.
Well, first of all, "the electromagentic spectrum" is "in use" everywhere in the universe, and includes things like radios and the sun. What I think you meant to imply is that humans have been living with mm-waves before for extended periods of time. Which is absolutely false. The problem is that mm-waves are attenuated by air, or clothing, or buildings, or the atmosphere, or what have you. There are some mm-wave sources that humans have messed around with, but always for short durations (usually on the order of hours/days) and nearly always with a strongly attenuated signal (air, cars, buildings in the way.)
The reality is that no group of humans have ever lived their normal lives with a mm-wave source, period. The closest you can get is police speed guns, the vast majority of which are in the 10-25 mW range at 10-35 GHz. They are pointed away from the user; either you're the cop aiming them at someone, or you're the person in the car being tracked (if you're in the car, 35 GHz won't penetrate.) Even if you're a cop that decided to just point the radar gun at your face 40hr/week for ten years, that's far, far less exposure than someone living in a city equipped with 5G.
So nobody's lived their lives with a mm-wave source, OK. In order for mm-waves to ever actually get -to- your body, you would have to propose a new massively expensive system deploying massive amounts of unprecedented power mm-wave radios closer to humans than ever before: in other words, 5G.
Come on, that's completely different from what we're talking about here - that's a centimeter wave system. Humans have lived with the presence of centimeter waves for a while, and we are fairly sure they're safe. Cell phones, microwave ovens, RC cars, everything uses centimeter waves.
>> I have quite a few of the papers that 5G nuts cite, and they are not convincing in this slightest
Well, I'd like to point out I'm not a 5G nut. I typically don't bother clicking on those weird rabbit holes of conspiracy blogs tied together with red string based on some inconclusive data. I'm also not saying 5G is dangerous. I simply believe it's unknown. We simply do not know, as a species, what living our lives bombarded with unprecedented amounts of mm-waves will do, as nobody has done it before. Likely it will be harmless; however, there is a chance it will not be. As with many things, it may be the cumulative dose over many years that is harmful.
I wasn't accusing you. They're usually well-meaning rather than overly conspiratorial - although there are a few near me who, let's just say don't mention the Rothschild family near them.
In line with your final paragraph I suppose I agree that we don't know for sure, but it's unlikely.
As to high frequency radio waves specifically, Fighter aircraft have had millimetre band radars which people have worked with for half a century at least now (along with microwave links in the cities and satellite links etc.).
I feel like it's important to point out that long term exposure can't be too long term in the sense that the phenomenon has to be weak enough to have not yet been observed yet strong enough to outpace the churning of biological material in effects.
As a final remark, here is some actual data about 5G exposure in relation to local limits (UK in this case) i.e. fractions of a percent of the ICNIRP guidelines at most. Also, no one I'm aware of has proposed a mechanism as to why the wavelength matters at this scale?
Just to let you know, your arguments make sense to me and it is nice to see that not all "anti-5G" people are scientifically illiterate conspiracy theorists. No coronavirus in your argument, good ;)
I still respectfully disagree, but that's more because I trust the experts who designed and authorized 5G deployment, including regulations on transmit power than because of extensive knowledge on my part. The risk is never zero, but I think it is low enough for immediate deployment.
So I posted this comment because I wanted to spark a discussion where intelligent people consider the safety implications of 5G, which is very hard to find on the internet. Unfortunately that hasn't happened so far, so I decided to dig a bit more on my own.
Step 1 so far has been Wikipedia, where I found the reassuring sentence "The scientific consensus is that 5G technology is safe.[99][100][101]" Unfortunately, after checking those sources it appears that one is a blog and the other two are news articles about the same event - a press release from the ICNIRP. Further research on the ICNIRP shows that it is a private organization that declared itself that it only considered the thermal dangers of RF in the cm-wave range, and any other dangers do not exist.
And that is the common path to "proving" 5G safety on the internet: "the only way that this could be bad is heating; there's no heating; bam, it's safe, we're done here."
The reality, of course, is that EM waves have many mechanisms of action. So far, we know of the following:
- Ionizing radiation (nuclear weapons, x-rays, etc) can easily kill you or give you cancer
- Non-UV visible light can increase skin aging, cause retinal injuries
- Tons of EM waves can burn you or increase body temperature causing other problems (tissue heating)
- Nerve disturbance from low-frequency RF
That's four methods of ways EM waves can hurt you. Everyone is in agreement about that - no matter how you slice it, there's a minimum of those four. But that's a minimum. Relatively few good quality longitudinal studies have been run about EM waves. "Hey, can we put this weird thing in your home and see if it gives you cancer?" is a hard sell, I guess.
But unfortunately there seems to be not one single high-quality, longitudinal study researching the effects of living with constant mm-wave sources. There are a few short-term studies, but most of these are on the order of hours (!) of exposure.
One interesting thing I did find was a Swiss study showing people living near high voltage power lines were more than two times more likely to get Alzheimer's than people living just 600m away. While that's a completely different type of EM than 5G, it does hint that there may be more harmful mechanisms of EM radiation than we currently know.
Yes, but the "other mechanisms" of EM harm you list do not apply to mm-waves. Imagine being wrapped in lead to protect your organs from harmful mm-waves. That's effectively already the case; mm-waves can't penetrate skin, eyes or anything else.
Moreover, the power levels you're encountering from a base station are minuscule. It's underappreciated as a miracle of engineering that we can reliably communicate with signals that are 10^-12 W. You're at more danger from a 10W fluorescent light bulb.
>> mm-waves can't penetrate skin, eyes or anything else.
Ah, I see you made the same mistake as basically everyone researching mm-waves: you forgot about babies. See, they're born with very thin skin, so mm-waves can go right through their dermis. Will that have any effects? Who knows! It'll be a long time till the first 5G babies will be in college.
Furthermore, a lot of things are cumulative effects. Asbestos, of course, doesn't instantly kill you; asbestosis requires a large exposure over a long period of time.
Look at the research around kHz EM waves and Alzheimer's, for example. We've all been near a HV line for few minutes, I'd bet. When they were invented, I'm sure people tested them by standing next to them for hours - they were fine, of course. Turns out you have to build up exposure over a period of some 15 years living next to a HV line... and then you have a 200% chance of Alzheimer's.
Why do you think there is a risk to babies? What are you having that on specifically? It seems like you are reaching for something "untested". Also microwaves use 2.4Ghz, heat lamps are infrared, 5G is a wide array of spectrums, so what specific frequency and power do you think will harm babies and why?
(Also if something just affects babies, it doesn't make sense to talk about the cumulative effects over decades)
I do not believe that anything in the tens of GHz is either safe or unsafe. The frank reality is that we simply do not know, as not one person in human history has ever lived with a mm-wave source of any power for an extended period of time.
With new RF technology, the burden is usually on the creators to demonstrate its safety, not random Internet commenters to prove its danger.
I was hoping to have an actual discussion here, but I guess people would rather just blindly defend any new technology without even a cursory look at its safety.
That's not even remotely close to being a source for what you are saying.
You need a source that shows that there is something different about babies, different about the 5G frequencies, and different from the light, infrared, microwave and radio frequencies that are currently being used everywhere.
Instead, you referenced a paper on a military pain ray that uses focused super high power 100Kw 95Ghz waves that says it penetrates 1/64th of an inch. Your microwave is 2.4Ghz, just like your router, but it works at 1kw. There is an enormous gap between saying "what about babies" and what you linked. They have basically nothing to do with each other. I think you realize that, but you keep saying "we don't know", when you really mean "I don't know".
> the burden is usually on the creators to demonstrate its safety
How can anything be deomstrated to someone who ignores what they are being told and repeats "we just don't know" while supporting their predefined beliefs with giants leaps in logic and excessively irrelevant information?
> I was hoping to have an actual discussion here
I don't believe you. You didn't even confront my original question of what frequencies and effects you are specifically worried about. All you have seemed to being up so far is heat from power 100 times what your microwave uses. 100kw is 4,000 times the power of a soldering iron that can melt tin and lead.
Oh come on. What I am saying - and I will repeat this - is "mm-waves do penetrate the dermis of human babies." No more, no less. This is the scientific consensus. I provided the first source I found, which related to military research, yes. The broader context is irrelevant, I'm not sure why you wrote a whole comment harping on that. I provided it as a simple counterpoint to someone saying that mm-waves did not penetrate skin.
And the broader context of what I am saying is not that 5G is dangerous, just that there should be more effort to determine its safety before rolling out a new type of EM radiation that humans have _never lived with before_.
You realize that a source would be something that has to do with what you are saying right? I asked for a source on how a 5G frequency at their amplitude would affect a baby differently and you linked a 100kw military pain ray that has nothing to do with what you are saying, then said, 'i just linked the first source I could find'. That isn't a 'source'. Also your current link doesn't say anything about what you are claiming and actually contradicts it. Even what you linked says that it doesn't go as deep as the thickness of a fingernail. Wifi penetrates more and infrared heat lamps are far more powerful, so again, what frequencies and what effects are you specifically worried about?
> new type of EM radiation that humans have _never lived with before_.
It isn't a 'new' type of em radiation. It isn't a mystery, it is just a mystery to you. You just avoid confronting real information by saying "I don't know". You have been shown facts, your ignorance of the subject is your own fault at this point, but you are desperate to hang on to it.
Nah, sorry, you can't use that both ways. Either you generalize existing research to cover a range of EM and circumstances of use, or you don't. You can't just pick one when it's convenient.
>> You have been shown facts, your ignorance of the subject
OK, +1 for making me actually laugh. Dude, I am the only one of us linking any scientific studies or literature review whatsoever. You're the one sprinkling snarky one liners about routers burning you. You also still didn't respond to https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6765906/
Just relax: I'm not saying 5G is the illuminati turning the frogs gay, I'm saying -maybe- we should research a new technology before deploying it to humans at an unprecedented scale.
> we should research a new technology before deploying it to humans at an unprecedented scale.
5G is an industry marketing term, not some fundamental redefining of physics. Nothing about emission of radio waves is some new or unknowable phenomenon that requires more research to understand. If you're suggesting otherwise, the burden of providing even a mildly plausible hypothesis is on you, not just "I dont understand this, therefore maybe it is bad".
All you did was link a 20 page paper without quoting what you think is relevant, and yet I already said that it contradicts what you are saying. It doesn't talk about children or infants or babies but it does talk about how shallow the penetration depth is.
I've given you real numbers from your own sources and broken them down into intuitive examples. You might not realize this, but this is just an exercise in seeing what someone does when they have to continually reject information while having none of their own to hold on to a belief that is rooted in emotion.
> I'm saying -maybe- we should research a new technology
Now you are saying that, before you were saying "what about penetrating a babies thin skin". It has been researched, you found some research, it just doesn't say what you want.
We haven't even gotten to the fact that microwave communications are already on lots of cellphone towers and used to communicate with office buildings etc. Not only that but these higher frequencies don't even go through walls. They barely go through rain or fog.
We moderate HN less when YC or YC-funded startups are the topic: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....
That doesn't give you a pass to break HN's rules egregiously and ignore our requests to stop. You've been doing this for a long time, including with accounts before this one, and we've warned you on many occasions. Actually we probably let you get away with it for longer than we normally would.
Looking back at your account history I noticed other cases of you attacking other users, which we didn't see at the time and certainly would have moderated and perhaps banned you for. Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23186380.
I appreciate that you've also posted a lot of good comments (but then again, also a lot of snarky ones). If you genuinely want to commit to using HN as intended, we can unban you.
There is a difference between attacking someone and being blunt. If you want to ban people and scold them for being blunt then you might as well say that, but to say this is attacking someone is not reasonable. It would be different if there was some sort of uniformity to this, but it seems more like a self righteous crusade to get people to apologize to you personally for not sugar coating what they say.
I don't need you or anyone to apologize to me personally. The only issue is whether you'll abide by the site guidelines in the future.
Interpretation is part of applying the rules, but I don't think there's so much variance in how we interpret them. Something like that gets pretty regular and tedious after you've done it a hundred thousand times.
Someone said mm-waves cannot go through skin. I mentioned that the scientific consensus is that babies' skin is thin enough that mm-waves penetrate the dermis. I was absolutely not starting a "think of the children".
>> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
The established consensus is that mm-waves do penetrante the dermis of babies. Even recent research can agree on that. Here's one recent source.
Its hard to take your arguments seriously when you link to a paper on military research on a weapon that "can heat the skin to a temperature of 130F" and then compare it to cellular RF emissions, which would typically encounter your skin at a power level in the range of 10^-12W (-90dBm). It doesnt matter which layers of skin that does or doesnt penetrate, its just not going to do much of anything.
Please don't post flamewar comments to HN. Not cool.
We've had to ask you this multiple times before. Continuing to do it will eventually get your account banned, so please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use the site as intended from now on.
I have this irrational fear of 5G for some reason and I consider myself a rational person with a pro-technology bias.
This fear stems from a combination of factors leading to unknown unknowns:
1. Little benefit for consumers with 4G (this is admitted even by pro 5G side implementing the tech)
2. Thus leading to question - who benefits when your toaster joins road sensors in the internet of shit.
Webcams already are not doing too hot on the privacy front.
3. Lack of health studies
4. The feeling of being pushed down consumer throats.
5. Last not least the fight between 5G providers/implementers at a state level .
Why do it when you can get by without doing it? You just need to use the "science" label here and there, and throw the word "peer reviewed" here and there. And nay be you will have to pay off (which comes up to virtually no cost to the entities in question) some of the top people in the research (Who probably are planted long time ago in various fields)...
Excellent article - still I can't resist a rather large quibble.
The commonly stated assertion that spectrum is a limited resource is not quite accurate.
Spectrum is technically defined as a range of frequencies. That's all. In business parlance spectrum is also attached to large areas of land - this spatial dimension is more important than most people realize.
Radio signals themselves exist in space and time, not just in a range of frequencies. More radio signals - and data bandwidth - can be packed into a given space by shrinking the volume a given signal "occupies".
We can do this by reducing signal power and increasing cell density, in addition to other techniques described in the article. More cells, smaller cells. This is a big part of how 5G expands cell network capacity. But the telecoms have downplayed the effect of this relative to the the claim that spectrum is limited.
The mobile carriers have financial incentives to do this. These incentives are lower costs and monopoly control.
Fewer bigger cells at higher power are cheaper than many smaller cells at lower power. The monopoly part is exclusive use of spectrum on a given piece of land.
The problem is, the legal attachment of spectrum works with very large areas of land (where km^2 is a smallish unit) and large periods of time (years), relative to radio signals. Both attachments are grossly inefficient.
By shrinking cell size (power) and increasing cell density, several orders of magnitude more network bandwidth is possible, plenty even to share (modulo cost of physical infrastructure).
Spectrum scarcity is a myth. The current legal regime enriches monopolists and is otherwise a tremendous waste of potential. We pay higher prices for unnecessarily limited bandwidth.
Spectrum scarcity is also a function of our wasteful utilization.
What you describe (small cells) is one version of what we call spatial multiplexing. Basically, reuse spectrum in physically separate areas. But you can also do this in a way that doesn't sacrifice the centralized, large cell architecture.
Namely via beamforming. You don't have to share spectrum if you're not dumping power in all directions. Already cell towers are split into three sectors; you could continue to increase sectors, or dynamically point beams at individual users. Being suitably isolated from one another, each beam allows spectrum reuse.
It's not free obviously, it requires more expensive base station antennas, but I think a direction we'll be heading in.
Would anyone like to speculate on what new tech we will see that will take advantage of this? I can already stream (to my device) a 4K 60fps video while in a park, and at home I have gigabit fiber (up and down) which is barely ever used to it's full potential. What cool stuff will I be able to do in 10 years time when I have 10Gbps upload while sitting in a park?
One isn't really supposed to ask these questions, and just assume:
- that every cellphone user in the world is going to just run out tomorrow and buy a phone that's $200-300 more expensive to replace the phones they have now, have been replacing less and less of in the past half a decade, that they barely utilize to its fullest if the network were just prevalent everywhere today
- that some measurable fraction of the towers spaced every 150ft will not be vandalized, broken and sold for scrap in many places in the world and have to be replaced in order to have the throughput as advertised, that the companies will be just excited to replace, whose total cost will be less or the same as current infrastructure costs
- that despite the junk rating of many of the biggest teleco corps, they are well capitalized with pay for such a network from the ever increasing profits they reap from current consumers and wont have to rely on more junk financing and will take great care of the infrastructure just like all the great care they have put into existing infrastructure. Nothing in the future could ever threaten their solvency
It's not clear to me that it makes sense to replace wired with wireless when density is such that fibre can be economically laid to a location.
5G has a lot of possibilities both for improved mobile data and for last mile where it either doesn't exist or is some old 1Mbit ADSL line. But I'm not convinced it will generally make sense to ditch good wired broadband just because 5G is available.
Even if you technically could, I expect the economics won't work out, e.g. throttling/caps/overage charges, for people trying to do a lot of data-heavy things like video streaming if they have an alternative.
I spent over a decade waiting for fiber. Now that it's here, I sure don't want to ditch it. Anyway, it's installed. And the fiber itself can almost certainly be used for higher speeds in the future, now that it's there.
Reminds me a bit of the alleged quote "640K is more memory than anyone will ever need on a computer"
It is difficult to know now, but I think the probability is very high that we will "need" the bandwidth down the line for something we will find useful.
One thing 5G should allow is getting a lot of data point to point wirelessly - specifically for things like oscilloscopes and such, I remember a guy from keysight saying their big push now is make everything work together on the network (which they can now do with things like 5G)
Actually, low range of high frequency signal is beneficial. The reason is, that even at relatively large transmission power the signal dissipates quite quickly meaning you can have stations service relatively small area.
This means the spectrum is shared by less users, the uplink is shared by less users, you can serve higher concentration of people.
Massive MIMO is not a 5G only thing. 3GPP Rel 13 on 4G already had it for FDD-LTE. And for TD-LTE it was supported from Released 8 or 10 if I remember correctly. Massive MIMO in 5G only meant NR was designed with it in mind. Although mostly in the sense of TDD still, FDD Massive MIMO still has some on going work to do.
But yes, in many case 5G is more like 4.99G. It is pretty much a evolutionary step from 4G Rather than a big leap from 3G to 4G. And we should expect capacity to increase from 5x to 10x.
No mention of unlicensed bands? After the demonstrated superior utilization of those tiny portions of this range allocated for ISM? My goodness, it's almost as if FCC works only to perpetuate outdated "giant telco" models to the detriment of all consumers!
Out here in the country we'll operate our own "small cells" without permission from ATTVZN and without paying FCC a cent. If anyone notices there will be "investigations" but mostly no one will notice because physics. Eventually industrial users of this tech will realize "hey we don't need those telco goofballs either!" and their lobbyists will muscle through some exceptions. Eventually everyone whose house has sheetrock walls will be so excepted.
This article wasn't about unlicensed/ISM radio, though there have certainly been advances there as well. I'm genuinely curious about which parts of the ISM range you see with "superior" utilization compared to cellular networks - I work with those type of radios for a living.
For most of the spectrum, the devices and services that consumers may purchase are limited to those available from giant hierarchical oligopolies. In the ISM bands, we have a bunch of different technologies, but most importantly Wifi. There are much less stringent barriers to anyone using or selling devices and services that use Wifi. And it all works! Those who live in dense urban areas sometimes scoff at Wifi, but what they're seeing is the tiny segments of spectrum allocated to unlicensed use, not inherent problems with open spectrum. The excuse offered in the past for spectrum oligopolies was "oh it's physics" because the very simplest radio technology we could imagine in the 1930s does suffer from interference at lower frequencies. Of course we've had more advanced radio tech for a long time, but ignore that... at the frequencies under discussion for 5G, interference over any but the shortest range is no longer a threat. That means that most of the claimed justification for telecom monopolies (and perhaps the agency created to enforce those monopolies) goes away. It's sad that TFA is still focused on "carriers".
Sure, I dont want to understate the impact that WiFi has - its a good technology, and its great that it can be used without a license. I wish more spectrum was available unlicensed - a portion of my income depends on it! My unlicensed radio experience is largely with 900MHz ISM systems, and I wish "its just physics" was a lame excuse. Fact is, the #1 thing limiting performance on these systems in most urban and suburban places is noise - I've installed plenty of radios capable of high order QAM that were limited to QPSK or even GMSK strictly due to noise. I'd say the noise floor in 900MHz ISM is something like 3-5 orders of magnitude higher than in similar sub-GHz licensed systems. Uncoordinated frequency hopping systems are noise-resistant, but still leave a lot of theoretical performance on the table.
Cellular systems have their purpose too - WiFi is not a good technology for covering a city with internet access, as many attempts to do so should prove. Nor would it be wise to allow unlicensed use at high power - ask anyone who's ever lived in an apartment how their WiFi is, then imagine if power levels could be increased by an order of magnitude to or two.
We should not listen to scientists about 5g health concerns?
5g highband is basically an always on radio that can pinpoint specific users. Like,you would be tracked as you move room to room and interact with people. Why is everyone ok with this? Especially when hardware killswitches are not the norm or legally required.
if anything 5G will put extreme pressure on more efficient computational paradigms to replace our half century old silicon approach ... biology evolved the human brain to run on 40 watts of power ... the massive additional carbon footprint of 5G will accelerate our escape from silicon
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 240 ms ] threadAlso why would I need help when reading a blog post??
It's not about usefulness, not really. It's about engagement and retention - much like newsletter spam and annoying please-subscribe popups, The Metrics always apparently show that they work amazingly compared to a clean page.
I wonder: Would even the most ambitious of telecommunications researchers in 1990 have thought it likely that in 2020 we’d be rolling out gigabit wireless speeds to handheld devices over nation-spanning networks?
The scaling of Moore’s Law was clear by then, and certainly fiber optics represented a practical path to near-unlimited wired bandwidth. What were the radio folks thinking at the time?
The main benefit of cellular is when you're away from WiFi. But unless you're constantly traveling to places without WiFi, you get that from a $20/month plan and the existing cellular network.
Also helps when FRBNY in conjunction with the Tresury dept via state street and blackrock is buying their HY bonds (TMUS US87264AAT25 [Ba3], S US85207UAK16 [B1], CTL US156700BC99 [Ba3], LVLT US527298BF96 [Ba3], VOD US92857WBQ24 [Ba1] for just a few examples, all trading way over par) on you, the taxpayers behalf, on leverage, in the secondary market and thus helping to lower their ongoing borrowing costs.
No gross mis-allocation of resources or moral hazards as far as one eyes can see… surely the companies will use these funds much better this time for capex… lol
Perhaps if VC's funded many more things to the same notional as the uncollaterized debt extended globally (not "valuations", not re extending to the same companies after previous funding from the same one), I would agree to degree , if they faced 100% loss of value extended if the endeavors they funded didn't pan out (not considering firesales of assets that may have been used in such endeavors during the bankruptcy/liquidation process).
* The higher data density of 5G per spectrum allows you to just upgrade towers instead of having to place more dense towers with 4G. This is the "5G is cheaper" point as it allows you to avoid having to build more towers.
* Due to the increase in data demand in some few places places, you'll have to place 5G towers very densely to meet it, more densely than in the age of 4G. Not because of the technology just because it's now a different era where demand has increased even more.
So this seems like only a theoretical possibility since in practice they'll just have faster towers instead of fewer of them.
> Due to the increase in data demand in some few places places, you'll have to place 5G towers very densely to meet it, more densely than in the age of 4G. Not because of the technology just because it's now a different era where demand has increased even more.
For millimeter wave it is because of the technology. Those frequencies don't penetrate as well so regardless of how many users there are or how much bandwidth they're using, the towers have to be closer to the devices which means you need more of them.
With constant demand, you can service a higher amount of people with the same tower density thanks to 5G. If the number of customers is increasing, it means you get more money but you only have to upgrade the towers instead of having to put them more densely. That's how it's cheaper.
> For millimeter wave it is because of the technology.
Good point.
Not to mention the security implications from both angles. As an end user do you want random cell phone traffic egressing through your network. And that easily opens up the network to cell site spoofing moreso than they already are.
A big reason LTE, GSM, evdo etc were successfull was because the full stack, from the backbone to endpoint/user was managed by the carrier.
Offloading that to home users who actively put routers in between interference sources like windows, fridges, washers/dryers and then tey and extend their signal with repeaters is a questionable goal at best.
Why? You could easily enforce a policy that only who use your fiber network at home qualify for these femtocells. Considering that majority of backbone fiber is an oligopoly already, this wouldn't be an issue.
> Most users home routers are garbage for latency and loss sensitive applications, of which voice would qualify.
Do you have any source on this claim? IP network has become just as fast and resiliant as the pure teleco network (reason why 5G is based on IP in the first place). IP calls from Facetime, Google Duo, Skype, Zoom, Whatsapp and others work just as good as regular calls if you have decent coverage. And you can easily implement QoS for calls through your own network, which is what the old 3G/4G tech was already doing.
> And that easily opens up the network to cell site spoofing moreso than they already are
How common is WiFi spoofing in your experience?
> A big reason LTE, GSM, evdo etc were successfull was because the full stack, from the backbone to endpoint/user was managed by the carrier
The reason they had to do that was because IP stack wasn't good enough 2 decades or even a decade ago. Unless you are in a 3rd world country, IP network is just as good as 3G/4G stack today.
> Offloading that to home users who actively put routers in between interference sources like windows, fridges, washers/dryers and then tey and extend their signal with repeaters is a questionable goal at best.
Okay, you might want to revisit that thought couple of years from now :)
There are limited markets where verizon or att offer both broadband and cell service.
And the other big cell carriers don’t have a broadband market.
To your other point. Most gpon modems are arris or some other brand all in ones these days that carry voip converters/cable television and then normal tcpip traffic. They are bought to maximize profits and rental fees and not with packet forwarding in mind. There are acceptable levels of loss and latency on residential networks that don’t generally carry over to campus or business services.
Add in they also run dns, dhcp and firewalling and often some “extra” parental controls and sometimes a vlan for guest access.
It’s not the residnetial customers fault for the placement either. But most demarcs for telco and internet, even in new construction is in a utility room that is generally right next to other utilities. At least in single family homes.
In apartments sure they may be better placed but still often next to the air handler. And give. The range of 5g, the first floor or two is all that matters.
[1]the biggest difference of 4G over WiFi is concentrated coordination , but this could be achieved for Wi-Fi too.
Edit: apparently 5G does not use UWB
Think video delivery kiosk - I'd like to rent a movie please or I'd like today's daily news videos/VR. Downloaded in 3 secs from a vending machine?
It's not just the bandwidth. UWB has a peak power density limit of −41.3 dBm/MHz. 5G is 55 dBm.
Note the many, many, many orders of magnitude difference...
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/4/18295310/amazon-project-ku...
Seamless access/mobility and accessibility to maritime, airline, remote satellite phones etc is one of the ways 5G is hoping to sell 'access anywhere' and diversify from just mobile.
Most NTN access is via a terrestrial satellite basestation acting as a gateway into the mobile networks.
I think one day the communication 'transport' will be a worldwide mesh and operator profitability will be solely about business services on top of that.
Already seeing that to some extent with multiple operators sharing towers, radio front haul and spectrum. At the moment its early days of course.
The point is that as more services migrate to higher bands or more spectrum is made available (TV spectrum partially reallocated, 3G is sunset), there is more capacity available for rural locations that need that lower band.
Lots of work on alternatives to fibre for those last few miles e.g. dedicated wireless links to local distribution nodes in villages.
I have a 90 sqm two storey house with a detached garage, workshop and quite a bit of land around it and I need 6 WiFi routers to get a signal everywhere, and even then it's spotty and slow.
Sometimes makes me wish I just had a data SIM on all devices and be done with it.
Open source 4g/5G stuff that was posted a while ago looks really nice, but apparently it would be illegal to operate :/
>The main benefit of cellular is when you're away from WiFi.
For you maybe.
The billions you mention are a result of government auctioning, it doesn't mean anything to users besides added cost.
5G aims to allow for completely new applications that were not possible before, and hoping that's where the money will come from. Ultra-reliable and low latency, and massive machine type communications are two new areas 5G is pushing into. The first will allow applications like self driving cars, remote control with immediate feedback, and combined with the increased speeds, augmented and virtual reality. The second area is for the smart city/home type of applications.
This is all from my digital communications professor with ties to Ericsson, but on a personal note I'd be hype to explore distant places in real time by wearing a vr headset and controlling a drone with a 360° camera and <10ms latency. You could be anywhere in the world and actually interact with the environment with just a 5G enabled headset and a 5G-drone renting app. Racing through an abandoned mall! Drone laser tag in a redwood forest!
A blurb like this can be found everywhere where 5G is talked about. It sounds technical and knowledgeable, but it actually makes zero sense whatsoever. Self-driving cars? No. If the fundamental assumption is that every single vehicle everywhere is communicating, that system is fundamentally flawed and will never take off. Remote control? This has been possible for over 100 years. You can literally do that with a spark-gap transmitter, let alone current 4G tech. Immediate feedback? In what context? Augmented and virtual reality? Now you're just blasting buzzwords to sound smart. Come on. Smart city/home is another common buzzword, but that's actually where the vastly increased capacity of 5G starts to become relevant.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/4G-LTE-Advanced-Pro-Road-5G/dp/012804...
Ref: https://www.huawei.com/en/about-huawei/public-policy/5g-spec....
EDIT: Fixed typos.
https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-expands-flexible-use-c-band... "Makes 280 Megahertz of the 3.7-4.2 GHz Band Available for 5G Services While Relocating Existing Satellite Operations to the Upper Part of the Band"
The millimeter wave stuff is in addition to this for downtown cores, stadiums, etc. 5G modulation itself adds max 15-20% throughput compared to 4G LTE so more spectrum is needed to deliver on the weird promises telcos made.
I would rather say that there will always be limits of our understanding and building equipment for usage in various mediums, even in a vacuum, we're still only probing our theoretical knowledge of null boundary interactions between photons[0].
> For example, a standard cellphone can fit an array of 72 antennas operating on the 39 GHz mmWave band. A similar 72 antenna array in the 700 MHz low-band frequency would be larger than a typical home door.
And what would it cost? In an environment where cellphone sales have been declining for at least 5 years now at least on the high end (all the games Apple has been playing with sales reporting…), which end users will be willing to bear the cost of the device now?
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bH7OGkEZX7I
That said, do the numbers from the article concern anyone else at all? I'm generally all for progress, but more than 1 million devices per km2? And massive MIMO antenna arrays spraying EM waves in every part of the spectrum from 600 MHz to 50 GHz?
More than a million devices per km2 ~= 3 million devices per square mile. Am I the only one that thinks that's a bit crazy? I don't want everything from my toaster to my door to my water bottle to be transmitting massive amounts of information to who knows where all the time.
More concerning: the antennas. Current regular MIMO 4G towers are 2x2 or 4x4. Already, there are 5G towers installed today that are 128x128. These are planned to be spaced -extremely- densely in cities, and very close to people (on every floor of offices, on lampposts, etc.) This is a necessity due to the spectrum used. And not only that, but they're using new spectrum that hasn't been used before - instead of the MHz to low GHz range we all know and trust, 5G towers will be up to near 50 GHz (!). Especially the fact that millimeter wave/extremely high frequency is normally blocked by everything from drywall to glass, but now we're intentionally aiming massive amounts of EHF waves with hundreds of antennas in a small space.
Call me a luddite, but I'm more and more thinking that we need a high quality longitudinal study about any effects of this kind of stuff before we go from 2x2/4x4 at well known frequencies to putting 128x128 EHF antenna arrays every hundred feet.
Also as a note, regular MIMO (not "massive") wouldn't provide location information as the scattering channel is generally considered random.
But maybe it has a negative effect on anything from birds to bacteria to humans, and I think it's worth investigating that before we deploy it extremely rapidly in all of the world's cities.
I mean, the #1 post on HN right now is how highly skilled engineers accidentally made the Golden Gate Bridge emit a loud noise that's blanketing the Bay Area. And that's a bridge, which humans have been building for some 20,000 years. And it's made out of one thing - steel - which we generally understand very well.
I really hope there will be no side effects. But the chance that there will scares me a bit. 5G will be rapidly rolled out at enormous, unprecedented scale and density in nearly all the big world cities - and in 2020 most of the world lives in cities.
No it isn't. The engineers knew this sound was going to happen. It was not accidental.
And again, the things involved here are bridges (which humans have been making for some 14,000 years) and wind (familiar to humans for our entire existence.) 5G uses little-studied frequencies around 50 GHz that we really know extremely little about compared to the widely used cm-wave.
A really big increase in a number without a framework to contextual it doesn't mean anything.
Given the financial and health stakes (>$100B & >100M lives) a through animal study and RCT trial doesn't seem unreasonable. You could relatively cheaply raise a few generations of animals on top of a 5G antenna and look at cellular and reproductive toxicity. Following that, you could do a RCT with real/ sham antennae in bedrooms as part of roll-out.
Even so I can't imagine this kind of study actually showing anything while wasting multiple years during which we could be moving forward. How about you raise money to fund the study virtually nobody wants to do and if you find something you can watch smugly while everyone tears down towers.
>How about you raise money to fund the study virtually nobody wants to do and if you find something you can watch smugly while everyone tears down towers.
I find this to be a very rude comment. I have no interest in being smug, And honestly don't think it is a high risk. Given the health of hundreds of millions of people, I would like to see some basic confirmatory testing conducted to confirm safety. It is fine if you disagree, but why bother responding if you are just going to make snide comments and be an asshole about it.
Also, the 128x128 5G MIMO deployments I could find were distributed deployments, placing remote radio heads very densely at relevant indoor locations. I assume they're referring to places like large train stations or shopping malls.
Also, regarding the "massive amounts" part: there is little incentive to transmit more than a few hundred mW per channel, just because the mobile device needs to transmit at a similar level anyways, and there are battery and cooling considerations, even neglecting the cost of power amplifiers for these frequencies.
And, the 1 million devices per square kilometer is actually just a dense, standing crowd. It's the average density that can be reached over any sizable area (putting a school class's phones in a box until the end of the lesson would imply some insane density in that box, but there'd be a limit for how many boxes could be arranged into a dense grid).
I understand the MIMO designation, and I am not trying to misrepresent it in my comment. I know that 128x128 is not sixteen thousand (!!!) antennas on one tower, but rather 256, half for rx and half for tx.
That said, two hundred and fifty six antennae on one tower is far, far more (orders of magnitude, plural!) than the typical 2x2 or 4x4 4G towers deployed today. And keep in mind that this is certainly not "just" 256 antennae for one mall, because 5G is blocked by anything thicker than a post-it (the article mentions how future plans include deploying massive MIMO to each floor of a building, as drywall and glass both block many 5G frequencies!)
The reality is that no matter how you want to slice it, 5G means moving from widely spaced 4G towers transmitting at frequencies we have used for around a century to hyper-dense massive deployments of large numbers of antennae transmitting at new and relatively un-studied frequencies. 4G towers are (mostly) kept away from humans getting too close; 5G towers will be on lampposts and on the same floor of your office where someone can touch them.
I'm not saying 5G is inherently bad, or good, I have no idea. I haven't run a longitudinal study, but _neither has anyone else_, and that's what scares me a little. Look, the #1 post on HN right now is how highly trained, expert engineers accidentally made a bridge (one of the oldest human inventions, around for millennia) create an extremely loud eerie noise currently blanketing San Francisco.
And sure, transmit power is low. But it's not just about the power. Today I went out and enjoyed a warming 1000 W/m2 of hundreds of-nm EM radiation all over my body. Then I accidentally looked at the source, which hurt my eyes and disoriented me. Later I played with a device of only 0.01W emitting highly temporally coherent EM radiation. I had to put on safety equipment, because it had the possibility to harm me, including permanently damaging my sight.
I think you misunderstand the concept of directional beamforming. The antennas in question in a phased array are 'elements' that cooperate to steer a more focussed beam in a given direction.
The phone in your pocket when transmitting (whether 3G/4G/5G) is the biggest contribution to your personal health. Not a base station.
I'd be concerned much more about low and mid band that can penetrate much further than high band. I am concerned about high band too (skin surface effects) but know nothing about this and assume work has been done to quantify and assess.
My biggest problem both with 5G hype and those that seek to cast doubt on it is that both sides misrepresent the 'facts' to suit their agenda. Sadly that's true in all walks of life.
I am going to disagree with you that the phone is always the bigger risk. Apparently Huawei 5G base stations are above 11 kilowatts, and these are being rolled out closer to humans than ever before.
Sure, some research has been done, but the vast majority of it has been simply pointing some mm-waves at people for a few hours and checking if they're OK afterwards. I haven't seen anything for babies (baby skin is thin enough that mm-waves can go through the dermis, unlike adults) and not even a hint of any quality longitudinal study.
And yes, I agree, the 5G hype/hate is so rabid that it makes it much harder to find any actual science on the internet about the subject. Personally, I don't have any agenda here. I was generally positive on 5G until I read the details in this great and informative article, and thought "wow, that's a lot of antennas, and a lot of new frequencies, and they're closer to us than ever before"
If you know of any decent studies on this, I'm all ears - please drop any links.
Assuming we are talking about RF power output here, that is far higher than anything I've ever dealt with, and I'm not sure that it's at all right. A typical macro cell has 20 Watts of RF power output (for example).
The relevant international standards are those from ICNIRP, and they've recently updated and expanded on these in great detail around safety margins of various frequencies.
The UK telecoms regulator, Ofcom, recently did a safety study of actual deployed equipment, looking at measuring the RF output from base stations.
Therefore I'm not sure where figures like 11 kW are coming from. Maybe there are some very hot (and inefficient) early base stations somewhere using 11 kW of mains power to produce 20 or 40 W of RF energy? But considering Huawei is heavily advertising 5G as being "greener", that wouldn't seem likely either. But even then, this is far higher than even the wall socket consumption of the equipment I've dealt with.
https://www.fiercewireless.com/tech/5g-base-stations-use-a-l...
The 11 kW seem realistic when you take a multi-sector mast that fills 200 MHz TDD with 1W/Mhz in 3 separate 120 deg sectors (600W), at least once you include the compute to handle aggregate data at a realistic maximum spectral efficiency of ~10 (bit/s)/Hz (6 Gbit/s). These power amplifiers are typically between 10 and 40% efficiency.
If you look at a microwave magnetron (don't), you go blind in seconds from your eyeballs getting cooked and turning opaque. Surgery could theoretically replace them (and leave the retina), but I'm not aware of that ever happening.
It's quite feasible for a sizable eNodeB to consume 11kW, but keep in mind that they have significant amounts of compute hardware.
It'd help if you'd make a bit more of an effort to check/validate/cite the concrete numbers you name, if you don't want to be seen as a "confused anti-5G person". I don't think you are malicious, considering your history, but no everyone will.
Are you talking about a laser? The mechanism of injury is the same as any RF injury -- localized heating. You stick a soldering iron on your retina, you're going to have permanent damage to your vision. The reason you only need a low power to do damage is because the power is spread out over a very small space, because your cells absorb the energy instead of letting it pass through, and because the retinal cells are extremely sensitive to temperature (a 10C increase is apparently all you need to permanently damage them).
> Today I went out and enjoyed a warming 1000 W/m2 of hundreds of-nm EM radiation all over my body.
Skin cancer from exposure to sunlight kills people. UV light has enough energy to rip electrons off of atoms in your body, causing much damage. ("Ionizing radiation.") From physics, we know where the boundary between ionizing light and non-ionizing light lies (in the middle of the UV spectrum). We know ionizing radiation is dangerous -- we understand the mechanism and the effects. (Notice how much safety equipment is involved in getting a dental x-ray. Minimum dose required to get the necessary image. The technician stands in a separate room lined with lead. You wear a lead vest to avoid exposure anywhere that's not needed for the image.)
We also know when ionization stops happening. The energy carried by a photon is directly related to the wavelength of the light, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon_energy. Below the middle of UV, photons don't have enough energy to ionize anything. Thus begins "non-ionizing radiation", which as far as we know, just burns you. You can, of course, die from burns, so it's not harmless. That is how microwaves cook foods -- water absorbs energy from 2.4GHz photons quite well ("dielectric heating"). The RF energy is converted to heat, and makes you a hot meal. But you sure wouldn't want to have your hand in there when it's on.
Anyway, these effects are well understood. Any "5G is harmful" argument needs to propose a new mechanism for causing damage, or show how a known mechanism works at 5G frequencies. You could show that it turns out we were wrong about ionization (experimentally testable). You could show that certain tissues convert all the energy to heat (again experimentally testable).
Sure, there could be a new mechanism for causing damage that only happens at some random location in the EM spectrum not related to any other effects. Someone has to be the first to discover it. Portal 2 has a good quote: "Marie Curie invented the theory of radioactivity, the treatment of radioactivity, and dying of radioactivity."
It seems unlikely, though. You can do an infinite amount of research without discovering something that doesn't exist. People want fast YouTube downloads more than they want a 0% chance of risk. The risk is already so close to zero that it doesn't matter.
> Look, the #1 post on HN right now is how highly trained, expert engineers accidentally made a bridge (one of the oldest human inventions, around for millennia) create an extremely loud eerie noise currently blanketing San Francisco.
I believe they knew it would make a noise. They just didn't think anyone would care.
A deeper problem is that humans are capable of creating much more complicated systems than nature. Ever debug some code and wonder "how did that ever work?" It's just a lot more complex than basic physics, and so there are a lot more unexpected results.
And there lies the body of your argument.
Now I will disprove it:
- Photochemically-induced retinal injury (NOT tissue heating) by 430nm EM radiation [1]
- Exposure to ~600 THz EM radiation disrupting the circadian rhythm [2]
- Living within 50m of a <100 kHz EM radiation source more than doubles the chance of Alzheimer's disease [3]
- Spinal cord stimulation at 10 kHz significantly helped chronic pain [4]
[1]: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1751-1097....
[2]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4734149/
[3]: https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/169/2/167/95445
[4]: https://academic.oup.com/painmedicine/article/20/10/1971/541...
The EM spectrum is vast and complex. Deploying unprecedented numbers of towers, each with more antennas, at higher powers than ever before, at new and untested wavelengths [5], strikes me as risky. You may, of course, draw your own conclusion. As with many technological improvements, we may not know the true cost for many years to come.
[5]: from the above article - up to 2 orders of magnitude more antennas per tower, orders of magnitude more towers, power significantly higher than before, and 48 GHz.
You see, if you hadn't switched the units around, this would have been a good example. But I'm failing at searching a way for how this could have been deliberate, yet non-malicious.
Also, 10kHz is something you get with modern power electronics, not RF. Take a look at the way they couple that energy into the subject, and what the power levels are.
Can you please give a concrete citation for the power being "significantly higher than before"?
I am not sure how these signals come from power lines, which is what the study looks at. I would assume those are in the 50-60Hz range. (But we can use that band for communication too! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremely_low_frequency)
I'm aware of it's usage for pinging currently-diving submarines, and in the slightly higher region, providing wireless bidirectional low-bandwidth comms into deep mines. The power lines do have quite some magnetic stray fields, though. Not that it's too massive; it's not more than a few (3~4) kA at most.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Here's a helpful link. HN can be a great place full of interesting people, but you really do have to assume good faith.
Look, I came into this discussion trying to have an intelligent discussion about the possibile risks of 5G. When I opened the article I was somewhat positive about 5G, now I am somewhat negative. I am not some crackpot saying it will damn us to Hell eternally, I'm saying hey, we've messed around with novel parts of the EM spectrum before, why not at least evaluate the risks first? Never before in human history has anyone lived with a mmwave source, and now we are planning to roll them out at unprecedented speed to all the world's cities without a single longitudinal study on the risks.
I've been playing with different ways to represent things partly for fun, and partly as a filter for this discussion. Anyone who can't trivially figure out that 1 Hz ~= a wavelength of 299792 km does not have the knowledge necessary for this discussion.
Tens and hundreds of kHz RF has been created by humans. The first of studies have been coming out in the last decade about its effects. So far, it looks like living within 50m more than doubles your risk of Alzheimer's.
>> Can you please give a concrete citation for the power being "significantly higher than before"?
Sure. Both MTN and Huawei say that just with current systems we're looking at 200-300% of existing levels. And it's their job to make it sound -good-.
https://www.fiercewireless.com/tech/5g-base-stations-use-a-l...
> and partly as a filter for this discussion
coming. As I said earlier, I am not assuming bad faith from you in this discussion, but didn't see a good reason for mixing these up. It made me consider whether you might have soaked those numbers from popular media or (worse) echo chambers.
I guess it's just another example for sarcasm/humor causing problems on the internet, but this time making me worry whether you got captured by some echo chamber, instead of making the sarcastic author look like a troll.
And, just to note, I personally try hard to not behave badly on HN, so feel free to assume a misunderstanding instead of me assuming/exhibiting bad faith.
The next link suggests an increase in Alzheimer's disease from living near power lines. I am not sure how meaningful the results are; the entire document is caveats on how they selected which data points to use, the field strenghts are vastly different from wireless signals, and the frequency ranges are off by 5 orders of magnitude.
The last link is about a device designed to receive radio signals and apply electrical current to your spinal cord. If the radio waves worked by themselves, why would they implant a receiver?
You latch on to the "large number of antennas" thing, but it's not really a big deal. All the antenna array does is create interference patterns that control the direction of the signal. The antennas are excited with the desired signal with different phase delays, and then the interference results in some spots receiving 0 power (in an ideal case) and another spot receiving all the power. A friend of mine wrote a small simulation you can play with in your browser: https://apenwarr.ca/beamlab/. (The reality is that channel capacity depends on SNR, and while these do increase the signal strength at the receiver, they more importantly reduce the amount of noise that reaches the receiver. It is easier to null out received noise in a certain direction than to transmit power somewhere.)
In the past, we did this with carefully placed antenna elements that receive and re-radiate signals from another antenna element: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yagi%E2%80%93Uda_antenna (among many other designs). Now that DSP has become more powerful, it is possible to do it in software instead of hardware, and get better results. (Phased array radar have existed since the 70s. WiFi and 4G networks also use MIMO.)
I guess my summary continues to be: some sort of mechanism of causing damage will have to be proposed and tested. Maybe things on the very low end are bad (as your study [3] suggests). We know things on the high end are bad (don't get too many x-rays). But those effects roll off, and 5G is in an area where those effects probably don't exist.
Anywhere current flows through a conductor, radio waves follow. We have been using radio for 100 years, and we kind of know how this stuff works. I don't think there is any reason to worry (and many experts in medicine and RF agree with me).
I don't think there'd be any frequency-dependent effects that don't stem from the interaction of penetration depth, triggered circulation (transporting heat away), and deposited power. Neglecting triggered circulation, it'd seem viable to just test thermally-mediated health effects from focused, 0.01~10 W @ 20~50 GHz (spot size limited due to a reasonable (0.1~0.8) numerical aperture of the beam focusing system) radiation.
[0]: https://books.google.de/books?id=4dL6CAAAQBAJ Fig 3.a page 437
Photodissociation is not simply heating. Red light is for example known to affect the mitochondrial electron transport chain
I don't have a study on hand but I expect the effect to be less than lower frequency waves.
First thing to get out of the way, these are not ionizing radiation. Basically, the only thing electromagnetic waves up to visible light can do is heat. UV is borderline.
The question is what they heat. The general idea is that the lower the wavelength, the deeper the penetration. 2/3/4G frequencies will heat your insides, 50 GHz will only heat your skin. Of course the power is so that under normal conditions, the heating is negligible.
As for the effect of millimeter waves, while testing this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Denial_System they subjected people to massive (100kW!) doses of 95 GHz radiation. High enough to actually burn you, and yet, the adverse effects were minimal.
If you are talking about technical problems, like interference, and how to deal with radio waves that are starting to act a bit like light. I guess that 5G is designed by people who know what they are doing. Simply that we are able to make it work is almost like a miracle to me.
And yes, I am sure that 5G is designed by some brilliant people. Anyone getting that close to the Shannon limit is smarter than me. My hat is off to them.
But the reality is that this stuff just hasn't been trialed in any real way. Sure, the US government found 600 adults to get zapped for a few hours and only injured eight of them. But how about living with it for ten years? What about different frequencies? 100 nm is a world away from 300nm which is a world away from 500nm. Sure, they trialed 95 GHz and it was fine. What about 48 GHz? 25 GHz? All the other frequencies being used? What about with 256 antennae transmitting at higher power than anything before, right next to you, day in and day out for a decade?
One big claim is that all this 5G radiation is blocked by the skin, so we'll all be fine! Oh wait, what about babies? Turns out babies' skin is thin enough that mm waves can penetrate the dermis...
Furthermore, ionizing radiation and heating are not the only two ways EM can harm you. Just look at all the news about blue light for one example! EM radiation in the mm-wave range is still far understudied compared to the cm wave range.
Look, I think that 5G is probably going to be fine, health wise. But for something as big as this, it absolutely deserves at least one good longitudinal study. Of which there have been zero.
On top of that the military uses absolutely enormous energies in their RADARs and there's still little if any evidence of risk even including powers where you might as well have you head in a microwave oven
... What? I have no idea what "full" would be, but by any definition they are certainly not. Just a bit of air is enough to attenuate mm waves of even high power. (That's why we need so many towers!) There is not a lot of ionizing radiation out there, that's why we're not all dead (and why x-ray film even works.)
Maybe you're thinking of outer space? But it's not even true there - for an obvious example, visible light, which there is very little of by human standards pretty much everywhere in the universe.
"The military used it for some time and nobody died so let's put it pointing everywhere in our homes and offices" strikes me as a very weak argument for something's safety. As just a simple counterexample for why you cannot use that to demonstrate safety, consider that while mmwaves do not penetrate the adult human dermis, babies' skin is thinner and is easily penetrated by mmwaves.
> "The military used it for some time and nobody died so let's put it pointing everywhere in our homes and offices"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAF_Fylingdales
This is a 2.5MW Phased Array. If there was any provable health risks to these (there are ~10 of them in the west) we would know - there have been suspicions, but they have been investigated and no evidence has been found.
Why do we care about microwaves in particular when there are huge installations like these operating at much longer wavelengths which as you say penetrate further?
If there was immediate danger from electromagnetic radiation it would have been observed years ago - powerful microwave emitters have been in use in very proximity to humans since the second world war (Randall and Boot developed their magnetron in 1940)
I have quite a few of the papers that 5G nuts cite, and they are not convincing in this slightest - there is not a single paper that is both dealing with radiation within FCC limits, on animal test subjects, and have any macroscopic threat to health. This also doesn't include the issue that these papers are usually reports of fairly limited research so there is no discussion of the relative risk of their findings if there are any at all (Historical Evidence as mentioned previously sets an upper bound on that risk too).
Well, first of all, "the electromagentic spectrum" is "in use" everywhere in the universe, and includes things like radios and the sun. What I think you meant to imply is that humans have been living with mm-waves before for extended periods of time. Which is absolutely false. The problem is that mm-waves are attenuated by air, or clothing, or buildings, or the atmosphere, or what have you. There are some mm-wave sources that humans have messed around with, but always for short durations (usually on the order of hours/days) and nearly always with a strongly attenuated signal (air, cars, buildings in the way.)
The reality is that no group of humans have ever lived their normal lives with a mm-wave source, period. The closest you can get is police speed guns, the vast majority of which are in the 10-25 mW range at 10-35 GHz. They are pointed away from the user; either you're the cop aiming them at someone, or you're the person in the car being tracked (if you're in the car, 35 GHz won't penetrate.) Even if you're a cop that decided to just point the radar gun at your face 40hr/week for ten years, that's far, far less exposure than someone living in a city equipped with 5G.
So nobody's lived their lives with a mm-wave source, OK. In order for mm-waves to ever actually get -to- your body, you would have to propose a new massively expensive system deploying massive amounts of unprecedented power mm-wave radios closer to humans than ever before: in other words, 5G.
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAF_Fylingdales (and the rest of your comment)
Come on, that's completely different from what we're talking about here - that's a centimeter wave system. Humans have lived with the presence of centimeter waves for a while, and we are fairly sure they're safe. Cell phones, microwave ovens, RC cars, everything uses centimeter waves.
>> I have quite a few of the papers that 5G nuts cite, and they are not convincing in this slightest
Well, I'd like to point out I'm not a 5G nut. I typically don't bother clicking on those weird rabbit holes of conspiracy blogs tied together with red string based on some inconclusive data. I'm also not saying 5G is dangerous. I simply believe it's unknown. We simply do not know, as a species, what living our lives bombarded with unprecedented amounts of mm-waves will do, as nobody has done it before. Likely it will be harmless; however, there is a chance it will not be. As with many things, it may be the cumulative dose over many years that is harmful.
I wasn't accusing you. They're usually well-meaning rather than overly conspiratorial - although there are a few near me who, let's just say don't mention the Rothschild family near them.
In line with your final paragraph I suppose I agree that we don't know for sure, but it's unlikely.
As to high frequency radio waves specifically, Fighter aircraft have had millimetre band radars which people have worked with for half a century at least now (along with microwave links in the cities and satellite links etc.).
I feel like it's important to point out that long term exposure can't be too long term in the sense that the phenomenon has to be weak enough to have not yet been observed yet strong enough to outpace the churning of biological material in effects.
As a final remark, here is some actual data about 5G exposure in relation to local limits (UK in this case) i.e. fractions of a percent of the ICNIRP guidelines at most. Also, no one I'm aware of has proposed a mechanism as to why the wavelength matters at this scale?
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0015/190005/...
I still respectfully disagree, but that's more because I trust the experts who designed and authorized 5G deployment, including regulations on transmit power than because of extensive knowledge on my part. The risk is never zero, but I think it is low enough for immediate deployment.
And yet a domestic microwave at 800W is enough to both burn the skin in minutes and cause nerve cell damage in few seconds.
Step 1 so far has been Wikipedia, where I found the reassuring sentence "The scientific consensus is that 5G technology is safe.[99][100][101]" Unfortunately, after checking those sources it appears that one is a blog and the other two are news articles about the same event - a press release from the ICNIRP. Further research on the ICNIRP shows that it is a private organization that declared itself that it only considered the thermal dangers of RF in the cm-wave range, and any other dangers do not exist.
And that is the common path to "proving" 5G safety on the internet: "the only way that this could be bad is heating; there's no heating; bam, it's safe, we're done here."
The reality, of course, is that EM waves have many mechanisms of action. So far, we know of the following:
- Ionizing radiation (nuclear weapons, x-rays, etc) can easily kill you or give you cancer
- Non-UV visible light can increase skin aging, cause retinal injuries
- Tons of EM waves can burn you or increase body temperature causing other problems (tissue heating)
- Nerve disturbance from low-frequency RF
That's four methods of ways EM waves can hurt you. Everyone is in agreement about that - no matter how you slice it, there's a minimum of those four. But that's a minimum. Relatively few good quality longitudinal studies have been run about EM waves. "Hey, can we put this weird thing in your home and see if it gives you cancer?" is a hard sell, I guess.
But unfortunately there seems to be not one single high-quality, longitudinal study researching the effects of living with constant mm-wave sources. There are a few short-term studies, but most of these are on the order of hours (!) of exposure.
One interesting thing I did find was a Swiss study showing people living near high voltage power lines were more than two times more likely to get Alzheimer's than people living just 600m away. While that's a completely different type of EM than 5G, it does hint that there may be more harmful mechanisms of EM radiation than we currently know.
Moreover, the power levels you're encountering from a base station are minuscule. It's underappreciated as a miracle of engineering that we can reliably communicate with signals that are 10^-12 W. You're at more danger from a 10W fluorescent light bulb.
Ah, I see you made the same mistake as basically everyone researching mm-waves: you forgot about babies. See, they're born with very thin skin, so mm-waves can go right through their dermis. Will that have any effects? Who knows! It'll be a long time till the first 5G babies will be in college.
Furthermore, a lot of things are cumulative effects. Asbestos, of course, doesn't instantly kill you; asbestosis requires a large exposure over a long period of time.
Look at the research around kHz EM waves and Alzheimer's, for example. We've all been near a HV line for few minutes, I'd bet. When they were invented, I'm sure people tested them by standing next to them for hours - they were fine, of course. Turns out you have to build up exposure over a period of some 15 years living next to a HV line... and then you have a 200% chance of Alzheimer's.
(Also if something just affects babies, it doesn't make sense to talk about the cumulative effects over decades)
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334078749_Millimete...
I do not believe that anything in the tens of GHz is either safe or unsafe. The frank reality is that we simply do not know, as not one person in human history has ever lived with a mm-wave source of any power for an extended period of time.
With new RF technology, the burden is usually on the creators to demonstrate its safety, not random Internet commenters to prove its danger.
I was hoping to have an actual discussion here, but I guess people would rather just blindly defend any new technology without even a cursory look at its safety.
You need a source that shows that there is something different about babies, different about the 5G frequencies, and different from the light, infrared, microwave and radio frequencies that are currently being used everywhere.
Instead, you referenced a paper on a military pain ray that uses focused super high power 100Kw 95Ghz waves that says it penetrates 1/64th of an inch. Your microwave is 2.4Ghz, just like your router, but it works at 1kw. There is an enormous gap between saying "what about babies" and what you linked. They have basically nothing to do with each other. I think you realize that, but you keep saying "we don't know", when you really mean "I don't know".
> the burden is usually on the creators to demonstrate its safety
How can anything be deomstrated to someone who ignores what they are being told and repeats "we just don't know" while supporting their predefined beliefs with giants leaps in logic and excessively irrelevant information?
> I was hoping to have an actual discussion here
I don't believe you. You didn't even confront my original question of what frequencies and effects you are specifically worried about. All you have seemed to being up so far is heat from power 100 times what your microwave uses. 100kw is 4,000 times the power of a soldering iron that can melt tin and lead.
And the broader context of what I am saying is not that 5G is dangerous, just that there should be more effort to determine its safety before rolling out a new type of EM radiation that humans have _never lived with before_.
Looks like I am not the only one saying existing studies do not cover things, and there is a need for further research: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6765906/
> new type of EM radiation that humans have _never lived with before_.
It isn't a 'new' type of em radiation. It isn't a mystery, it is just a mystery to you. You just avoid confronting real information by saying "I don't know". You have been shown facts, your ignorance of the subject is your own fault at this point, but you are desperate to hang on to it.
>> You have been shown facts, your ignorance of the subject
OK, +1 for making me actually laugh. Dude, I am the only one of us linking any scientific studies or literature review whatsoever. You're the one sprinkling snarky one liners about routers burning you. You also still didn't respond to https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6765906/
Just relax: I'm not saying 5G is the illuminati turning the frogs gay, I'm saying -maybe- we should research a new technology before deploying it to humans at an unprecedented scale.
5G is an industry marketing term, not some fundamental redefining of physics. Nothing about emission of radio waves is some new or unknowable phenomenon that requires more research to understand. If you're suggesting otherwise, the burden of providing even a mildly plausible hypothesis is on you, not just "I dont understand this, therefore maybe it is bad".
I've given you real numbers from your own sources and broken them down into intuitive examples. You might not realize this, but this is just an exercise in seeing what someone does when they have to continually reject information while having none of their own to hold on to a belief that is rooted in emotion.
> I'm saying -maybe- we should research a new technology
Now you are saying that, before you were saying "what about penetrating a babies thin skin". It has been researched, you found some research, it just doesn't say what you want.
We haven't even gotten to the fact that microwave communications are already on lots of cellphone towers and used to communicate with office buildings etc. Not only that but these higher frequencies don't even go through walls. They barely go through rain or fog.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Looking back at your account history I noticed other cases of you attacking other users, which we didn't see at the time and certainly would have moderated and perhaps banned you for. Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23186380.
I appreciate that you've also posted a lot of good comments (but then again, also a lot of snarky ones). If you genuinely want to commit to using HN as intended, we can unban you.
Semi-recent example (shared previously w/ dang):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22133112
The person I'd replied to ... thanked me.
Your reply reads better without the attacks.
Interpretation is part of applying the rules, but I don't think there's so much variance in how we interpret them. Something like that gets pretty regular and tedious after you've done it a hundred thousand times.
"Think of the children!" is getting pretty tired sounding.
Someone said mm-waves cannot go through skin. I mentioned that the scientific consensus is that babies' skin is thin enough that mm-waves penetrate the dermis. I was absolutely not starting a "think of the children".
>> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
The established consensus is that mm-waves do penetrante the dermis of babies. Even recent research can agree on that. Here's one recent source.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334078749_Millimete...
We've had to ask you this multiple times before. Continuing to do it will eventually get your account banned, so please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use the site as intended from now on.
This fear stems from a combination of factors leading to unknown unknowns:
1. Little benefit for consumers with 4G (this is admitted even by pro 5G side implementing the tech)
2. Thus leading to question - who benefits when your toaster joins road sensors in the internet of shit. Webcams already are not doing too hot on the privacy front.
3. Lack of health studies
4. The feeling of being pushed down consumer throats.
5. Last not least the fight between 5G providers/implementers at a state level .
Why not at least do some health studies?
Why do it when you can get by without doing it? You just need to use the "science" label here and there, and throw the word "peer reviewed" here and there. And nay be you will have to pay off (which comes up to virtually no cost to the entities in question) some of the top people in the research (Who probably are planted long time ago in various fields)...
The commonly stated assertion that spectrum is a limited resource is not quite accurate.
Spectrum is technically defined as a range of frequencies. That's all. In business parlance spectrum is also attached to large areas of land - this spatial dimension is more important than most people realize.
Radio signals themselves exist in space and time, not just in a range of frequencies. More radio signals - and data bandwidth - can be packed into a given space by shrinking the volume a given signal "occupies".
We can do this by reducing signal power and increasing cell density, in addition to other techniques described in the article. More cells, smaller cells. This is a big part of how 5G expands cell network capacity. But the telecoms have downplayed the effect of this relative to the the claim that spectrum is limited.
The mobile carriers have financial incentives to do this. These incentives are lower costs and monopoly control. Fewer bigger cells at higher power are cheaper than many smaller cells at lower power. The monopoly part is exclusive use of spectrum on a given piece of land.
The problem is, the legal attachment of spectrum works with very large areas of land (where km^2 is a smallish unit) and large periods of time (years), relative to radio signals. Both attachments are grossly inefficient.
By shrinking cell size (power) and increasing cell density, several orders of magnitude more network bandwidth is possible, plenty even to share (modulo cost of physical infrastructure).
Spectrum scarcity is a myth. The current legal regime enriches monopolists and is otherwise a tremendous waste of potential. We pay higher prices for unnecessarily limited bandwidth.
What you describe (small cells) is one version of what we call spatial multiplexing. Basically, reuse spectrum in physically separate areas. But you can also do this in a way that doesn't sacrifice the centralized, large cell architecture.
Namely via beamforming. You don't have to share spectrum if you're not dumping power in all directions. Already cell towers are split into three sectors; you could continue to increase sectors, or dynamically point beams at individual users. Being suitably isolated from one another, each beam allows spectrum reuse.
It's not free obviously, it requires more expensive base station antennas, but I think a direction we'll be heading in.
- that every cellphone user in the world is going to just run out tomorrow and buy a phone that's $200-300 more expensive to replace the phones they have now, have been replacing less and less of in the past half a decade, that they barely utilize to its fullest if the network were just prevalent everywhere today
- that some measurable fraction of the towers spaced every 150ft will not be vandalized, broken and sold for scrap in many places in the world and have to be replaced in order to have the throughput as advertised, that the companies will be just excited to replace, whose total cost will be less or the same as current infrastructure costs
- that despite the junk rating of many of the biggest teleco corps, they are well capitalized with pay for such a network from the ever increasing profits they reap from current consumers and wont have to rely on more junk financing and will take great care of the infrastructure just like all the great care they have put into existing infrastructure. Nothing in the future could ever threaten their solvency
I wish them all the best!
You'll have lower energy use modes available for battery powered IoT devices.
You'll be able to be in a very dense crowd and have your services still work.
It is also lower latency that 4G, so things like gaming over your 5G connection become more possible.
These may not matter to you, but they are use-cases that 5G allows.
5G has a lot of possibilities both for improved mobile data and for last mile where it either doesn't exist or is some old 1Mbit ADSL line. But I'm not convinced it will generally make sense to ditch good wired broadband just because 5G is available.
Even if you technically could, I expect the economics won't work out, e.g. throttling/caps/overage charges, for people trying to do a lot of data-heavy things like video streaming if they have an alternative.
It is difficult to know now, but I think the probability is very high that we will "need" the bandwidth down the line for something we will find useful.
This means the spectrum is shared by less users, the uplink is shared by less users, you can serve higher concentration of people.
Massive MIMO is not a 5G only thing. 3GPP Rel 13 on 4G already had it for FDD-LTE. And for TD-LTE it was supported from Released 8 or 10 if I remember correctly. Massive MIMO in 5G only meant NR was designed with it in mind. Although mostly in the sense of TDD still, FDD Massive MIMO still has some on going work to do.
But yes, in many case 5G is more like 4.99G. It is pretty much a evolutionary step from 4G Rather than a big leap from 3G to 4G. And we should expect capacity to increase from 5x to 10x.
Out here in the country we'll operate our own "small cells" without permission from ATTVZN and without paying FCC a cent. If anyone notices there will be "investigations" but mostly no one will notice because physics. Eventually industrial users of this tech will realize "hey we don't need those telco goofballs either!" and their lobbyists will muscle through some exceptions. Eventually everyone whose house has sheetrock walls will be so excepted.
Cellular systems have their purpose too - WiFi is not a good technology for covering a city with internet access, as many attempts to do so should prove. Nor would it be wise to allow unlicensed use at high power - ask anyone who's ever lived in an apartment how their WiFi is, then imagine if power levels could be increased by an order of magnitude to or two.
I had the hope, 5G would finally solve the coverage problems in rural areas. sounds like it's just a vanity project after all...
We should not listen to scientists about 5g health concerns?
5g highband is basically an always on radio that can pinpoint specific users. Like,you would be tracked as you move room to room and interact with people. Why is everyone ok with this? Especially when hardware killswitches are not the norm or legally required.