19 ms·

Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, and FCC Bullying

204 points by sverige 7y ago

jchw 7y ago
I’m ambivalent. Cellphone internet is already faster than cable internet for many people. Even if the 5g health risk is complete bunk, do we really need 5g? Usually when I want internet that fast I want it at home or work. As such, I am a bit more excited for Wifi 6.
- tehlike 7y ago
  It might unblock new products. Being uneducated on 5g in particular, low latency fast internet can result in proliferation of mobile ar/ve devices, and bring internet to towns that otherwise dont have cable/fiber wiring, etc. There are some efforts in robotics that would have much better ux if they had faster internet in remote places. You can imagine stadia running on mobile on the extreme. Everything cloud streamed. Faster internet means when it matters you wont have to wait downloading a large binary, even though you dont need to be utilizing it 100% of the billing cycle. A mobile surgery center can be operated by a world renowned md, at the comfort of yheir home
  - jchw 7y ago
    >It might unblock new products. >Being uneducated on 5g in particular, low latency fast internet can result in proliferation of mobile ar/ve devices. If these new things rely on 5g, how well will they work as soon as they move out of range of 5g internet? >Bring internet to towns that otherwise dont have cable/fiber wiring, etc. >There are some efforts in robotics that would have much better ux if they had faster internet in remote places. But wait. Doesn't 5g have more limited range than previous wireless generations? It seems existing LTE towers would be a better solution if you just wanted to cover the earth in high speed internet.
    - ripdog 7y ago
      >If these new things rely on 5g, how well will they work as soon as they move out of range of 5g internet? That's... true for all network-based technologies. Electricity is great, but if you don't have a grid connection, battery or means of generating it... you can't use it. >But wait. Doesn't 5g have more limited range than previous wireless generations? It seems existing LTE towers would be a better solution if you just wanted to cover the earth in high speed internet. 5g includes a high-frequency version which is extremely high-throughput but short range and murdered by walls. There is a lower-throughput version at a much lower frequency which has solid range comparable with low-frequency 4g.
  - settsu 7y ago
    Historically, “can” has rarely become “did” with regards to improvements in rural broadband internet access.
  - epmaybe 7y ago
    There are definitely a lot of ideas and research behind them that are just waiting for more accessible low-latency internet connections. Robotic surgery was an interesting one for me, as the latency was a tremendous bottleneck for remote applications.
    - tehlike 7y ago
      Yes! From the days of 14400kbps(my first dialup connection), to 56kbps, to 128k, 1mb and now 1gb, each one of them found more use few years after they are introduced. 5g wont be an exception.
- merpnderp 7y ago
  At 5pm after work I get around 0kbps because everyone is leaving work and uploading selfies, starting music, playing a video or whatever. 5G would vastly improved the congestion problem so I could at least message I’ll be late as I’m stopping for milk, or I’ll be late as I’ve been in a wreck and am about to be airlifted.
  - Johnny555 7y ago
    Are you sure 5G is the only answer, or could your telco invest in more 4G infrastructure? (which they are probably reluctant to do with 5G around the corner)
    - NikolaeVarius 7y ago
      Spectrum is too congested for more 4g infra to make sense in some cities. https://www.zdnet.com/article/5g-needed-to-ease-4g-lte-congestion-opensignal/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/5g-needed-to-ease-4g-lte-conge...
    - toast0 7y ago
      Ignoring the problematic new spectrum... If 5g is reasonable to run on existing spectrum (I think this is generally true, but I don't know if mobile devices are configured for it), and it allows for more concurrent use (this is the promise, yes?), and if there are sufficient deployed devices to make it useful, refarming the spectrum to 5g would be useful for improving user experience in the situation described. Most carriers already went through this with 3g and LTE. You could invest in more 4g infrastructure in theory, that usually means adding more towers to shrink the cell size in congested areas; it's often the case that tower density is limited by municipal agencies rather than carrier budgets.
  - cookie_monsta 7y ago
    I think imminent airlifting merits a phone call, even these days.
  - posixplz 7y ago
    5G has nothing to do with the problem you’ve described — a symptom of insufficient tower backhaul. It’s typical for 4G LTE operators to deploy a minuscule 100Mbit fiber connection per tower. We should be investing in 1Gbit backhaul of LTE.A, but that’s not a sexy message for consumer TV ads. The farce of 5G is that it’s a pure marketing ploy. It’s not driven by technical need.
- DenisM 7y ago
  Competition to cable should improve speed and reduce internet prices. Right now we only have cable in most of the country, when 5g is out we will have three more last-mike providers: ATT, Verizon, and T-Mobile.
  - ledauphin 7y ago
    oh wait, two of those already are last mile providers in many parts of the country... I'm not sure who exactly they're going to end up completing with.
    - DenisM 7y ago
      Each other. Three providers better than one.
  - jchw 7y ago
    Well, that it certainly isn't going to do unless wireless providers suddenly decide to stop capping data so tightly. I don't think wireless providers are cheaper today if you include things like that in the calculation. Not to mention many people already use AT&T and Verizon for their home internet...
    - tehlike 7y ago
      Data caps will go away over time. People with things like nest cameras routinely go over 1tb data cap on comcast fiber. These people started moving to att. Over time, i do expect competition to work its way, on data cap matters at least.
    - DenisM 7y ago
      Take a look into 5g, eg Verizon, - it’s aimed to be last mile competition, and have the same caps. Comcast is capped at 200gb, I imagine 5g would be similar.
      - jchw 7y ago
        It seems the cap is not a universal constant - my cap with Comcast is actually 1024GB. I honestly thought 1024GB was enough that I'd never actually get very close to it, but wow, I don't have a single month under 200GB. In fact, most months are above 500GB for me. Of course not everyone uses 500GB a month. But still, I think the data cap story has to change if 5G is really to compete with other last mile options. Also, Today, wireless providers segment the crap out of their market, upcharging for basically anything, including "tethering." With Comcast, for all of their many faults, I can at least use my own modem, connect my NAS and have it accept connections from the open Internet, and of course connect a boatload of computers and network devices with no problems. Wireless providers, to gain parity, would have to suddenly cede control and offer plans that essentially offer no restrictions with dedicated IP addresses. It isn't clear to me that this will be priced any differently from existing last-mile providers. It's not like good wireless plans are cheap today in the U.S. as it is. 5G may in fact improve wireless speeds, but the hype has been that it will be game-changing and industry-shifting and I just don't see it. I'm sure the market will get segmented up such that many people will basically pay the same amount or possibly even more than they did for effectively the same outcome.
- starsinspace 7y ago
  Same here. I see all this marketing hype about 5G but I just don't know what I would do with it. Maybe I could some day get gigabit internet on my smartphone then... but what for? Streaming 8K video on the go? I fail to see any use case, at least for me.
- xoa 7y ago
  I'll admit I've quite understood this ambivalence about WAN links, and particularly not on tech sites. Consider: would you find no different on your LAN going back to 10Base-T, or being restricted exclusively to 802.11a-1999 for all networking (no wired at all) in a spectrum crowded environment, and thus with double-digit latency at all times? Or is gigabit or even higher actually useful in a variety of ways? How about for your persistent local memory speed, is SSD or even modern HDD of no benefit vs something on PATA or IDE or whatever from the 90s? I don't think I'm going out on a limb in saying that yes, having more bandwidth available has and continues to be quite valuable. So then take that and remember that there is zero fundamental difference between LAN and WAN except latency based on distance and even that isn't that restrictive on Earth, particularly within a country. It's about 93 miles per millisecond RTT under ideal vacuum/air/photonic-bandgap fiber, or 70% of that in standard optical fiber, so 1/90 of a second say could easily be enough for a round trip to anything within a good 300-500 miles. And at a minimum, any application done on a LAN right now could apply directly. For a lot of the public for example thin-ish clients might actually make a great deal of sense for their "personal computer", just as it long has for businesses or certain home users right now, if only they had reliable high bandwidth connections. A lot of things that many people currently centralize could be decentralized again if it was ubiquitous that the population just WireGuard into their LAN from anywhere within a hundreds of miles or more and have an experience essentially the same as being on the LAN itself. I mean yeah, we can imagine all sorts of future AR/VR applications or enhanced privacy via onion routing and the like (essentially being able to burn some spare bandwidth on it for the same experience as present) and the like too. But is it even necessary to imagine that far? We use LANs right now, and that for most people there is a dramatic split in their LAN/WAN experience isn't down to physics (most people aren't going more then 500-1000 miles away with great regularity).
  - com2kid 7y ago
    > For a lot of the public for example thin-ish clients might actually make a great deal of sense for their "personal computer", just as it long has for businesses or certain home users right now, if only they had reliable high bandwidth connections. A repeated dream. In reality thin clients suck even on a LAN. Remoting from a Windows PC to a Mac Mini sitting right next to it had unacceptable latency. Which is rather confusing given that modern machines can encode video at over 60fps.... Same OS to same OS is better, but not great. Every few years someone comes along and tries to deploy thin clients, and it never takes off en masse, good enough for a few limited scenarios though.
DenisM 7y ago
I remember the abundant “cell phones cause cancer” and “WiFi is like a microwave” scares 20 years ago, they all ended when people got their hands on nice and shiny touchscreen smartphones.
- supertrope 7y ago
  People notice short term tangible benefits. We're not maximally rational actors. People follow the group, authority figures, the status quo, and fear what they don't understand. A Facebook post is read much more than a 30 page peer reviewed statistical study.
  - sascha_sl 7y ago
    What is a statisical study?
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Oh, they’re still around. There was a local group protesting the installation of a cell tower too close to a school recently.
  - artursapek 7y ago
    Can you personally really be sure that it's not harmful long-term? Nobody has been able to study the effects of this stuff long-term.
    - DenisM 7y ago
      Yes. The physics of radiation and it’s medical impact is the single most studied subject in the history of such things, thanks to untold trillions sunk into research and development of nuclear weapons. Ionizing radiation cause DNA damage and cancer, the damage level can be both computed and measured. Non-ionizing radiation only causes temperature increase - lightbulb and microwave alike. The only difference is how deep the heat penetrates, and how many watts are pumped into the subject. The WiFi router is damaging in the same way as a very small lightbulb, and much less so than sitting in the sun.
zw123456 7y ago
One thing that a lot of people do not understand is that 5G can operate in any frequency band. In fact, for many 4G radios it is nothing more than a software upgrade, no change to the physical device or power levels, just faster and lower throughput.
- toxik 7y ago
  _Lower_ throughput? Care to elaborate?
  - sipjca 7y ago
    I think he was referring to 4G having lower throughout. Saying 4G->5G for most modems is just a software upgrade for most modems is not quite accurate. The RF hardware itself is generally not a full SDR. There are predefined RF paths tuned for the bands in 4G/5G. So it’s a little more than a software upgrade. Theoretically this is possible but I think companies like Qualcomm are too worried about pushing their new hardware instead of software. I do think it should move in this direction and it would benefit companies like Qualcomm to do this by selling software updates.
  - zb 7y ago
    I expect it was meant to say "lower-latency throughput".
    - zw123456 7y ago
      Yes sorry Lower Latency and higher throughput.
- sschueller 7y ago
  The fact that the general public doesn't know this is a failure of the carriers and FCC. Instead of clearly stating what the differences are and maybe not putting everything in the 5G bucket they got greedy and thought they could get it all. If the high frequency set was left out of 5Gs first round no one would have objected to the upgrade. I find the "We need 5G so we can have real time translation and autonomous cars" one of the dumbest arguments that can be made and it's pandering to an uneducated public. Why do we need more speed and connectivity for those things when we have better and better ML processors on Teslas and Google moving some voice recognition algos directly to devices? It's a bullshit argument.
amluto 7y ago
I find the argument that 5G is at all unsafe on a pole to be a bit silly. I think there are a couple of much more serious issues: 1. Is a millimeter-wave transmitter in a phone safe? The power output is moderately high, and these wavelengths are absorbed near the surface of your skin or your cornea. Cellphones are held near faces all the time. So I’d be much more concerned about using a 5G phone than about living near a 5G tower. 2. The 5G wavelengths May interfere with weather radar. I think that good weather forecasts are generally more important than cat videos.
- stefan_ 7y ago
  No one is even putting millimeter-wave transmitters in phones right now. But the more obvious point is that millimeter-wave 5G can only work with beamforming, and a beam that is going through your head where it is fully, entirely, fucking completely absorbed not a millimeter in, well, that's not going to yield a lot of throughput.
  - sipjca 7y ago
    Um... Yes they are. The Galaxy S10 5G has a mmW radio in it that’s transmits mmW waves for the uplink. The 5G spec also requires certain protection when the UE (phone) Tx wave might go through tissue. But you’re correct that it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to attempt to Tx/Rx on a beam pointed at your head since it will lead to drastically lower SNR
- EdwardDiego 7y ago
  > these wavelengths are absorbed near the surface of your skin or your cornea And they'd cause a... slight heating effect. That's about it. So yeah, if you held your voice transmitting phone directly to your face for several decades, you might create enough tissue damage to up the cancer risk. But then the radio engineers I used to work with climbed radio towers with microwave emitters putting out far far far more energy than a cellphone, and their only rule was "don't stick your head or crotch in front of a microwave transmitter as you're climbing up".
  - 7y ago
patient_zero 7y ago
The most important information in this piece is the FCC making rules favoring the very telecoms they are supposed to be regulating. Not that anyone familiar with this administration (or that scumbag Pai) is surprised.
- superkuh 7y ago
  Yeah, specifically the sub-6GHz C-band that it is basically ripping out of the hands of traditional radio media companies (ie, npr, etc) that use it for satellite distribution of radio shows. There's been a lot of complaints from radio people about this but the telcos have more money so they'll get it.
  - lostmsu 7y ago
    Which also makes total sense to me: I use radio maybe once a year, mobile data once an hour.
    - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
      Radio is used more frequently in poorer and more rural communities.
      - lostmsu 7y ago
        In the US? Do you have data for this? Do those communities even have cell coverage?
        wahern 7y ago
        > 90 percent of Americans over age 12 listen to AM/FM radio at least once a week — down 2 percent since 2009. (This does not include public media, which Pew covered in a separate fact sheet.) Source: https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/07/am-fm-radio-holds-strong-for-american-listeners/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/07/am-fm-radio-holds-strong-f...
supertrope 7y ago
5G is both a buzzword and moral panic. This is hilarious.
dane-pgp 7y ago
Imagine you are the leader of a country with a large military budget, strong central control over domestic media and policy, but little influence over global technical standards or device manufacturing. Game theoretically, it would seem that a tempting strategy would be to spend money on influencing the debate in other countries to make them mistrustful of new technology, to slow their economy and relative growth. If the influence campaign isn't completely successful, then you get the additional benefit of having the populace divided amongst itself, and not trusting its own institutions, which further weakens their ability to work together and project power internationally. Surprisingly, this strategy also works against old technology too. Imagine if you wanted to cause health crises in other countries by convincing enough of the population to be afraid of vaccines that herd immunity is lost. I know this sounds like its own conspiracy theory, but it would explain a lot about some of the weird fringe views that seem to be popular on the internet right now.
- H8crilA 7y ago
  Fake news and unfounded beliefs are as old as humanity. Blood-letting, female hysteria, witch hunting, even the Y2K problem. People still read and believe the Bible, thousands of years later. There's nothing new on this front.
- reggieband 7y ago
  I know you're getting downvoted for this controversial insinuation ... but I must admit my mind went there while I was reading these comments. The amount of FUD in this comment section, especially at the top, is almost suspicious. I get it that 5G doesn't exactly match the hype, that the cost of rollout is high, alternatives like improving 4G coverage and back-haul from towers are available, there are hints of problems with saturating the air in such high-powered/high-spectrum radiation etc. But how a group of supposedly tech savvy, future thinking, entrepreneurial types seem single-mindedly focused on the negative aspects of a technology seems to not match the normal crowd on hacker news. 5G isn't revolutionary but it is the exact kind of incremental improvement I expect to see in tech. It has some benefits (higher speeds, lower latency) and some drawbacks (proximity to towers, interference from large objects, cost to rollout). The discussion here seems to be entirely limited to maximizing the drawbacks and to limiting the benefits. In my experience with tech, increasing speed and decreasing latency has always netted noticeable benefits. From CPUs, GPUs, memory access and network access - even small improvements in speed/latency have enabled major improvements in features. In addition, rolling out 5G is going to force the rollout of infrastructure enabling 5G, e.g. the fibre lines needed to supply all of those new base stations. For those reasons I am excited about 5G.
moomin 7y ago
This is what happens if a large number of people bear externalities and few get the benefits. Unsurprisingly, people block the changes. Countries that don’t slant the benefits directly towards the big providers don’t suffer from these problems. You can screw people over with regulatory capture, but it’s hard to hide that you did it.
m12k 7y ago
It's my impression that the vanguard of the anti-vaxxer movement have long since moved on to 5G as their battleground of choice. And to be fair, of all the places they could try to incite another mindless panic, this is probably the most harmless they could have chosen - at least this time around no children will die from it.
- deleted 7y ago
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- api 7y ago
  It's a shame that so much activism is spent on nonsense and even outright destructive nonsense. All that energy could be going toward improving things that matter. Of course I think maybe what we are seeing is the activist arm of what I've heard called "conspiritainment." It's a way for people to LARP as activists at no real inconvenience to themselves. They get to feel self righteous at no real cost. It also feels a bit like the domestic version of what I've heard Africans call "white savior tourism" where people from the West go to Africa to fill their Instagram with how they are saving the world. Picking a real issue usually means confronting and speaking truth to power. That often has real life consequences. Attacking windmills (even literally! that is a thing too!) does not. Edit: I once heard an investigative journalist and PI make this joke: "How can you tell if a conspiracy theorist is right?" "Check for their name in a missing persons database."
  - The_rationalist 7y ago
    What you say is logically valid, why are you being downvoted?
    - guntars 7y ago
      People are just using the “I don’t like how this makes me feel” button.
    - reallydude 7y ago
      > It's a shame that so much activism is spent on nonsense and even outright destructive nonsense. All that energy could be going toward improving things that matter. I did not vote on it, but this is obvious pablem. An analysis of "why" is an interesting question, but aiming for platitudes repeated throughout every age in every society, is the epitome of discussion "noise".
Spooky23 7y ago
This is a shitty issue, because you have the uncertainty of health claims, with extreme claims that may even be ginned up to discredit opposition. My beef with 5G is the arguments for these disruptive rollouts are almost entirely bullshit. The United States is not in a race to drop a telephone pole with a short range antenna in front of my home. In the name of national security, Verizon and AT&T essentially get to do whatever they want, with no third party input. The FCC mandates lower rates for pole rent and allows new poles to be placed anywhere. In my case, Verizon put a pole in my neighbors lawn about 12 feet from an existing pole. Why does Verizon get a government subsidized ability to roll out infrastructure? Why doesn’t Spectrum or Comcast get it for their fiber and coax plant?
- pas 7y ago
  Any pending suits against this FCC decision? Or against Verizon for that unnecessary pole placement?
microcolonel 7y ago
I still have no idea what practical application makes use of 5G.
- XCSme 7y ago
  Playing the Chrome dino game as the connection will drop more frequently due to the smaller wavelength.
  - ripdog 7y ago
    5g has a low-frequency version which has comparable range and wall penetration to 4g.
vermontdevil 7y ago
My next door neighborhood is filled with the stupid 5G debates. The ignorance of some of my neighbors is breathtaking. And I live in a highly educated neighborhood. Go figure. At least the mayor and the council is on board for 5G rollout due to the current poor reception of 4G among some providers.
- XCSme 7y ago
  Won't 5G have even worse reception due to the higher frequency/smaller reception distance?
  - kbrosnan 7y ago
    With the current equipment and spectrum assigned it does have that problem. MKBHD goes over this is a video. It is awesome if you stand right underneath a 5g site, 1-2 gbps. If you head down the road a hundred feet/30 meters the signal drops to much closer to 4g speeds. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_CTUs_2hq6Y https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_CTUs_2hq6Y
    - mchristen 7y ago
      Reminds me of Sprint's rollout of Wimax technology. It was awesome if you had direct LOS with the tower and also kept your phone perfectly still. Eventually they canned it.
Wowfunhappy 7y ago
Nilay Patel wrote an editorial over at The Verge titled "Wait, why the hell is the ‘race to 5G’ even a race?": https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/23/18637213/5g-race-us-leadership-china-fcc-lte https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/23/18637213/5g-race-us-leade... > All I’m asking is that the next time you hear a wireless industry person talk about the “race” to 5G, stop and ask them why it’s a race. Ask who the competitors are, and what happens if we come in second place. See if you buy the answer. I suspect you won’t hear anything convincing. Faster internet is of course great in and of itself, but I'm not convinced it's deserving of public subsidies or regulatory exemptions, particularly in large cities that already have access to fast broadband. Furthermore, I'm quite concerned about NASA's warning that 5G will weaken our ability to forecast the weather, including life-or-death phenomena like hurricanes.
- rolltiide 7y ago
  yeah don't do this nobody at the T-Mobile store knows anything Its a fun thought exercise, but just smile and nod. The whole point of going into a brick and mortar store is just to see how the improv troupe will lie to you this time.
  - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    By "industry person", I don't think Nilay Patel was referring to standard retail workers. I read that sentence as targeted towards other journalists and professionals.
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago
  > I'm quite concerned about NASA's warning that 5G will weaken our ability to forecast the weather NASA issued no such warning. 5G would interfere with one satellite-based moisture measure around populated areas. NOAA’s commentary was around how that one measure would need to be statistically tweaked or supplemented. (The headlines resulted from NOAA’s head warning the Congress that if the latter didn’t give him funding for these tweaks, our forecasts would become dramatically worse.) Hurricanes, moreover, build over oceans. AT&T can’t keep a call in my Manhattan apartment; it’s going to be a while before 5G signals are making it to the middle of the Atlantic.
_bxg1 7y ago
There's such weird marketing zealotry behind 5G. They're acting like it's going to completely reshape society, but at best it's just... faster internet. In places where the internet is already pretty fast. I can only assume it's a mixture of political and economic stakeholders that have their own reasons for really wanting it to succeed (looking competitive against China, selling new phones, etc.)
- didibus 7y ago
  And honestly, they should start by improving home internet. It's already at the point where 4G is often more reliable.
  - thekyle 7y ago
    Oh man. If I could get unlimited 4G home internet and have multiple ISPs to choose from that would be the dream.
    - asdff 7y ago
      That's the current plan with 5G.
- thekyle 7y ago
  I wish it was as easy to get people enthusiastic about other networking upgrades like IPv6.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    Call it 6G IP.
    - antome 7y ago
      They can always rebrand it, like how 802.11ax is now "Wi-Fi 6" https://www.wi-fi.org/news-events/newsroom/wi-fi-alliance-introduces-wi-fi-6 https://www.wi-fi.org/news-events/newsroom/wi-fi-alliance-in...
corodra 7y ago
Reality is, it's also far more expensive to install 5g. It requires more fiber lines to run to more poles. Also, the telecom companies lobbied on state levels the max cities can charge for renting out putting stuff on poles. Plus trying to get cities to foot the bill. We are at the speed point of diminishing returns, 5g being said point. It's more money for not a real quality of life increase. I dont want my city to spend tax money on that.
- nerdponx 7y ago
  It's more money for not a real quality of life increase. I dont want my city to spend tax money on that. This is what it comes down to for me. We have housing crises, debt crises, infrastructure funding crises, and opiate crises all across the country. There are real and significant returns to investment on fixing those. Let's start there.
  - corodra 7y ago
    Agreed. Especially the opioid crisis. I think it's a "relatively easy" problem to solve. I'm totally for tax money to go to people who truly want to get cleaned up and put on the right path. I think that'll help a good chunk of people with a well funded program of the drugs that help kick the cravings and a work reentry system. Much better than having my municipality or county pay for 5g.
- proverbialbunny 7y ago
  Do you think running more fiber to the last mile will give more people the opportunity to have gigabit fiber ran to their home?
Nasrudith 7y ago
The whole "aesthetics" thing against new technology always struck me as bizzare and selective given all of the far uglier things already in place that they actively like. It seems to be the Oscar Wilde practically satirical "Anything which is of practical use is ugly and anything which isn't is beautiful".
- mooselumps 7y ago
  I don’t disagree with your sentiment but the 5G modem pictured on a pole in Atlanta looked like a mess with lots of exposed wires. I’ve never seen anything like that outside of a messy set up in a home office. I’m fairly certain that the carriers could fit the antennas and wiring into a more clean looking packages to put on poles.
MrVitaliy 7y ago
This feels a lot like the battle of Blue-ray vs HD-dvd back in the early 2000s. While Blue-ray did win, it was less relevant to the industry than the original CD format. Things just moved online, flash storage and everyone got high-speed internet. If public WiFi becomes more ubiquitous, especially in densely populated areas, 4G vs 5G will be just as irrelevant as the battles for next CD format.
- renaudg 7y ago
  Handover on public WiFi is generally horrible, the tech is simply not designed for that kind of use. I spend half of the day with WiFi turned off on my iPhone because it catches weak nearby signals even when they're simply not strong enough to work. iOS has "WiFi assist" which is supposed to be smart about that and fall back to a cell connection, but that simply never works in my experience.
- asdff 7y ago
  Every disc video game is a blu ray, I'd chalk that up to a win.
didibus 7y ago
Can someone with know how tell me if 5G is actually good tech? I feel like carriers just wanted to launch a new product called 5G, and just threw together some not that great tech behind it. Is 5G actually innovative? Are we talking order of magnitude improvements over 4G? Cause right now all I hear is that 5G achieves faster speeds and added throughput by simply putting more towers and access points around. That doesn't sound like innovative engineering. At that point, just wire fiber everywhere and create a giant Wifi mesh network with an access point at every house. Like that would give faster internet, but not very innovative. Normally a good innovative tech would cost less, take up less resources, and achieve higher speeds and throughput. I'm not sure 5G is that from what I heard. EDIT: Even if you downvote, I am asking a question that I'm interested in hearing answers for, so please still try and answer my questions. Thank you.
- renaudg 7y ago
  Yes. Just got upgraded to 5G (from 4G) for my wireless home broadband, went from 5-10Mbps average and 20Mbps peak to 200Mbps average and 380Mbps peak. It's at least as big a jump as 3G to 4G was. The hype is real.
- deleted 7y ago
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- proverbialbunny 7y ago
  >Is 5G actually innovative? Are we talking order of magnitude improvements over 4G? 5G theoretically is similar to when cable modems moved from DOCSIS 2 to DOCSIS 3. Docsis 2 ran over a single channel (a single frequency range) and if that channel filled up it could switch to another channel. Docsis 3.0 allowed modems to bond to multiple channels at once, significantly reducing the ability for the line to fill up, and giving people much greater speeds. This is when average speeds in the cable modem internet world went from 12mbps to 100mbps. In a similar vain, 5G can span the entire frequency range (up to 96ghz I believe), so the closer someone is to a pole the higher their frequency range can span, reducing bandwidth on lower frequencies and providing higher speeds. Those who are far from the pole might be running 5g at the 4g frequency range, but because that will be only a few people far enough away, the bandwidth should be faster and more responsive, even on the 4g range. People on this thread are saying things like, "The more people that adopt 5g the slower it will go." but as counter intuitive as it is, the more people who are on 5g the faster everyone's speeds will be. All cell companies have to do is upgrade their existing 4G towers to 5G and over time everyone gets better internet, even if no more poles are laid out. Though, without more poles, the improvements could be mild.
PorterDuff 7y ago
Since I don't download uncompressed 4k video anymore, I'm personally getting practically all of the value of the internet (to me) from merely having a cheap cable connection at home. I've never been certain who 5g or fiber is really targeting. Amazon works fine, Netflix works fine, downloading an OS or language tool set isn't too heinous. High data speed to a phone is uninteresting, but YMMV. As usual, improvements become less useful on the margin. The one use case I've run into might be robot cars, probably lower latency/higher bandwidth. I don't know enough about where the intelligence actually lives or how much in the way of inter-car communications is actually required though.
- nitrogen 7y ago
  Faster upload speeds enable new applications -- easier high res streaming, self-hosted storage (stream from home to your phone regardless of whether what you want is on a commercial streaming platform), just plain less waiting when creating and uploading creative work
  - richrichardsson 7y ago
    Faster upload speeds is something that I wish was more prevalent. Most ISPs that I have experience of prioritise download speeds over upload, but for my use case there is a point where increased download speed doesn't give me any measurable benefit, but being able to upload at a decent rate would be a huge benefit.
supernova87a 7y ago
What I want to know is whether -- as technology is supposed to -- 5G will bring me cheaper and faster cellular internet for all its hype. No? I'm just going to burn through my data faster, and pay more to the carrier? Why am I interested then? Isn't more access and more affordable prices the goal of the FCC as well? Why do many other countries have so much better and reasonably priced data?
coliveira 7y ago
5G represents the end of the oligopoly maintained by Comcast and Verizon. There is a lot on stake for these giant companies, and the fight will be ugly. Chinese companies have a clear advantage in developing this technology because they have a huge country with new networks developing, free from the constraints of an established oligopoly.
renaudg 7y ago
Really surprised to see the beating heart of tech that is HN turn into a luddite forum on this occasion. Last week I got upgraded from 4G to 5G for home broadband here in London, UK. It just became commercially available in my area (on Three) As I said in another comment, my average speeds went up from 5-10Mbps to 150-250Mbps and peak ones from 20-25Mbps to 350-400Mbps. It absolutely is the game changer it's advertised to be in terms of enabling new real-world use cases. Remember how video streaming was theoretically possible on 3G but totally shit in practice until 4G came along ? 5G is a similar kind of step up. You can expect an order magnitude more bandwidth on mobile than with 4G, and that matters. In other words : the hype is real.
- povertyworld 7y ago
  Is data going to be cheaper too? Otherwise, it's not going to change anything for most people. It'll just mean I can blow through my monthly quota in a day instead of a week.
  - renaudg 7y ago
    This particular service doesn't have a quota, it's unlimited.
- manmal 7y ago
  My 4G connection in Austria has been able to do 120Mbps for years now, sometimes even 180Mbps. What you are seeing might simply be that you are mostly alone in your cell, and not really 5G related. Once more people have a 5G modem, things will get worse for you again.
  - 420codebro 7y ago
    That was true with 3G to 4G, yes. But with 4G to 5G there is hope for relief in this area. One of the big features of 5G is the ability to handle a magnitude order more density with more "intelligent" frequency allocation, modulation, and (the big one) - LoS beamsteering. Of course, with all things in life there are tradeoffs. The tradeoff in this case is a 5G provider infrastructure radio every few hundred feet in urban areas to enable the LoS beamforming with the density factor required.
smkellat 7y ago
My city is looking at a total 5G ban. A city charter re-write is going to be needed to topple the current municipal administration. Moving to non-partisan elections would probably help since some of the current city council incumbents either didn’t graduate high school or only graduated high school over 50 years ago. Party structures protected those incumbents with this literally disconnected population.
- tracer4201 7y ago
  What city is this and what are their justifications for the ban?
- proverbialbunny 7y ago
  That's silly. 5G can be as simple as upgrading existing poles. No new poles need to be added, because 5G works on lower frequency ranges.
jorblumesea 7y ago
One of the most important points that is missed about 5g is what 4G did for us. It's pretty clear that the widespread adoption of faster mobile technologies has enabled technology companies like Facebook, Google, Youtube, Netflix etc to thrive. Investment in infrastructure has unforseen benefits that only seem obvious in hindsight. What will 5G bring us? Who knows. But if the past is any indication, it will benefit American companies if we invest in it. If not, all of that growth will go to China instead.
dubliner2077 7y ago
Drop my mind monthly bill and fuck 5g, I have all the speed I need and more than 64k RAM for my Phone.
tunesmith 7y ago
Regarding the health impact of cellular transmission, has anyone noticed that even the google search results for this are a total trash heap? I have a friend that turns off bluetooth transmission for all his devices every night, uses only a wired headphone for his phone, and even unplugs his wifi router every night. He's someone that doesn't know the difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation. I was tempted to make fun of him for all of this, but after searching on google and seeing what came up, I can't really blame him.
tzs 7y ago
Some of the fear of 5G is driven by Russia. RT has run several segments about it. Here are some: 5G Wireless: A Dangerous 'Experiment on Humanity' [1] Could 5G put more kids at risk for cancer? [2] How To Survive Dangers of 5G [3] Cancer risk? 5G wireless speeds could be dangerous [4] ‘Totally insane’: Telecomm Industry ignores 5G dangers [5] According to the New York Times, citing a declassified U.S. intelligence report from early 2017, RT videos on YouTube average 1 million viewers per day, and that is the highest among news outlets. They also say that lots of blogs and websites are picking up RTs claims and repeating them, without mentioning where they came from. Here's a Times story on this: "Your 5G Phone Won’t Hurt You. But Russia Wants You to Think Otherwise" [6] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_f9gpg4t6c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_f9gpg4t6c [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpXEyP0WMrk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpXEyP0WMrk [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aO1gZhwqCvI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aO1gZhwqCvI [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmLwuM0_MJg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmLwuM0_MJg [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML7wx_5n2z8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML7wx_5n2z8 [6] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/science/5g-phone-safety-health-russia.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/science/5g-phone-safety-h...
- Joeri 7y ago
  I’m reminded of the way the galactic empire in the foundation series descended into deliberate ignorance, with people actively turning their backs on technology, even while relying on it. Anyone up for starting the church of 5G and sending out priests to install cell towers?
  - TwelveNights 7y ago
    Nucleics gave the people so much more than what 5G gives to us. I would imagine that it would be very difficult to impress anyone with the advantages it brings, versus being able to levitate and emit light.
  - madengr 7y ago
    Well, I do RF for a living, and have designed some mmWave transceivers. Time to grow a long beard and through on a robe. I just need a chair that levitates.
achievingApathy 7y ago
Isn't this also a facet of our "war" with the rest of the world to be at the forefront of technology? There are those that think ceding being the first in things like AI would be so detrimental to the US economy that we'd never recover.
PGenes 7y ago
Would I be correct in stating that for 5G to be effective, the transmitter needs to be much closer to people than current towers. Also, there are currently legal limits on how much radiation may be transmitted by cell towers. It follows that it is not unreasonable that there may be be health effects. Arguments about China and Korea are actually quite scary because they provide justification for ignoring any health effects.
rayiner 7y ago
It’s very weird to see so many tech people siding with NIMBYs and hypochondriacs against technological advance. This is just a microcosm if a larger problem: municipal governments hold back progress. Right now, my Maryland county is lobbying to get veto power over a much-needed expansion of bridge capacity between the western and eastern shores of the Chesapeake Bay. Folks are also lobbying hard to shut down already-built light rail stations in the county. Municipalities make it impossible to densify urban areas, demolish obsolete buildings, build transit, build fiber, etc. Remember when San Francisco used to stop fiber deployment because some people thought the fiber cabinets were ugly? 5G is just the latest in a long list of things where a minority of loud voices holds up progress for everyone. Technologists are jealous of why places like Japan have such great infrastructure. They do because they don’t give local interests veto power over infrastructure. They don’t let environmental and historical preservation laws turn every attempt at infrastructure development into years to decades of litigation. Tokyo is criss-crossed with spiderwebs of fiber on utility poles. They don’t hold that up because some NIMBYs complained about the view. That’s how you make progress.
- artursapek 7y ago
  I can't stand the term "NIMBY's". What does that really mean? Is "NIMBYism" actually that surprising? When someone settles down somewhere and invests in a home, they will complain if you come in and try to do something to worsen their environment. What else can you expect? Is being a NIMBY just the opposite of being a pushover?
  - jnordwick 7y ago
    Investing in a particular plot of land doesn't mean you get to veto everybody else's choices of what they do with their invested plot of land. Pure democracy violates individual freedoms. You do you, and I'll do me.
    - artursapek 7y ago
      Usually when someone invests in a plot of land, they're also considering what surrounds their plot of land. Obviously you don't own the rights to the surroundings, but it's reasonable to expect you would have something to say about it if those surroundings were to get ruined somehow.
DiseasedBadger 7y ago
I have heard suggestions, that the drive for 5g is to increases the density of wifi signals, since the technology developed for airport scanners can passively image people in areas of high wifi-signal density.
ranrotx 7y ago
I have this feeling that 5G is more about cheaply deploying faster Internet (ie. comment about these things going up next to people’s bedrooms) versus a more expensive fiber deployment to the premises. Having driven around Dallas and seen a few of these things in residential areas, I can say that yes they are ugly. Unlike a regular cell site, it doesn’t appear that there is any kind of permitting process around these deployments as they just pop up suddenly. I’m all for progress, but there are ways to make utility infrastructure less noticeable to the urban landscape. Unfortunately with the approach I’m seeing with 5G deployments, the telecom companies will take the cheap way out.
stjohnswarts 7y ago
It's just faster internet. They may have something with "aesthetics" but that smells of NIMBYism which is driven by rich locals when 75% of the populace has no problem with it. There are no health risks either, that is just the imagination of people who follow Alex Jones or who believe in crystal energy. The FCC needs to bully them.
Rustty2 7y ago
I've been reading by through comments and I see only one mention of hazard to physical and/or mental health. That one mention is "EM bullshit". Could I kindly ask for anyone to point me to a site/s that make you believe there is no potential harm to humans from 5G? Thank you in advance :)
amin226 7y ago
The Health Network Blog is a blog that offers everything new in the world of health, weight loss, fitness and nutrition...http://bit.ly/2Htn2Mw http://bit.ly/2Htn2Mw

204 points by sverige 7y ago

jchw 7y ago

I’m ambivalent. Cellphone internet is already faster than cable internet for many people. Even if the 5g health risk is complete bunk, do we really need 5g? Usually when I want internet that fast I want it at home or work. As such, I am a bit more excited for Wifi 6.

tehlike 7y ago
It might unblock new products. Being uneducated on 5g in particular, low latency fast internet can result in proliferation of mobile ar/ve devices, and bring internet to towns that otherwise dont have cable/fiber wiring, etc. There are some efforts in robotics that would have much better ux if they had faster internet in remote places. You can imagine stadia running on mobile on the extreme. Everything cloud streamed. Faster internet means when it matters you wont have to wait downloading a large binary, even though you dont need to be utilizing it 100% of the billing cycle. A mobile surgery center can be operated by a world renowned md, at the comfort of yheir home
- jchw 7y ago
  >It might unblock new products. >Being uneducated on 5g in particular, low latency fast internet can result in proliferation of mobile ar/ve devices. If these new things rely on 5g, how well will they work as soon as they move out of range of 5g internet? >Bring internet to towns that otherwise dont have cable/fiber wiring, etc. >There are some efforts in robotics that would have much better ux if they had faster internet in remote places. But wait. Doesn't 5g have more limited range than previous wireless generations? It seems existing LTE towers would be a better solution if you just wanted to cover the earth in high speed internet.
  - ripdog 7y ago
    >If these new things rely on 5g, how well will they work as soon as they move out of range of 5g internet? That's... true for all network-based technologies. Electricity is great, but if you don't have a grid connection, battery or means of generating it... you can't use it. >But wait. Doesn't 5g have more limited range than previous wireless generations? It seems existing LTE towers would be a better solution if you just wanted to cover the earth in high speed internet. 5g includes a high-frequency version which is extremely high-throughput but short range and murdered by walls. There is a lower-throughput version at a much lower frequency which has solid range comparable with low-frequency 4g.
- settsu 7y ago
  Historically, “can” has rarely become “did” with regards to improvements in rural broadband internet access.
- epmaybe 7y ago
  There are definitely a lot of ideas and research behind them that are just waiting for more accessible low-latency internet connections. Robotic surgery was an interesting one for me, as the latency was a tremendous bottleneck for remote applications.
  - tehlike 7y ago
    Yes! From the days of 14400kbps(my first dialup connection), to 56kbps, to 128k, 1mb and now 1gb, each one of them found more use few years after they are introduced. 5g wont be an exception.
merpnderp 7y ago
At 5pm after work I get around 0kbps because everyone is leaving work and uploading selfies, starting music, playing a video or whatever. 5G would vastly improved the congestion problem so I could at least message I’ll be late as I’m stopping for milk, or I’ll be late as I’ve been in a wreck and am about to be airlifted.
- Johnny555 7y ago
  Are you sure 5G is the only answer, or could your telco invest in more 4G infrastructure? (which they are probably reluctant to do with 5G around the corner)
  - NikolaeVarius 7y ago
    Spectrum is too congested for more 4g infra to make sense in some cities. https://www.zdnet.com/article/5g-needed-to-ease-4g-lte-congestion-opensignal/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/5g-needed-to-ease-4g-lte-conge...
  - toast0 7y ago
    Ignoring the problematic new spectrum... If 5g is reasonable to run on existing spectrum (I think this is generally true, but I don't know if mobile devices are configured for it), and it allows for more concurrent use (this is the promise, yes?), and if there are sufficient deployed devices to make it useful, refarming the spectrum to 5g would be useful for improving user experience in the situation described. Most carriers already went through this with 3g and LTE. You could invest in more 4g infrastructure in theory, that usually means adding more towers to shrink the cell size in congested areas; it's often the case that tower density is limited by municipal agencies rather than carrier budgets.
- cookie_monsta 7y ago
  I think imminent airlifting merits a phone call, even these days.
- posixplz 7y ago
  5G has nothing to do with the problem you’ve described — a symptom of insufficient tower backhaul. It’s typical for 4G LTE operators to deploy a minuscule 100Mbit fiber connection per tower. We should be investing in 1Gbit backhaul of LTE.A, but that’s not a sexy message for consumer TV ads. The farce of 5G is that it’s a pure marketing ploy. It’s not driven by technical need.
DenisM 7y ago
Competition to cable should improve speed and reduce internet prices. Right now we only have cable in most of the country, when 5g is out we will have three more last-mike providers: ATT, Verizon, and T-Mobile.
- ledauphin 7y ago
  oh wait, two of those already are last mile providers in many parts of the country... I'm not sure who exactly they're going to end up completing with.
  - DenisM 7y ago
    Each other. Three providers better than one.
- jchw 7y ago
  Well, that it certainly isn't going to do unless wireless providers suddenly decide to stop capping data so tightly. I don't think wireless providers are cheaper today if you include things like that in the calculation. Not to mention many people already use AT&T and Verizon for their home internet...
  - tehlike 7y ago
    Data caps will go away over time. People with things like nest cameras routinely go over 1tb data cap on comcast fiber. These people started moving to att. Over time, i do expect competition to work its way, on data cap matters at least.
  - DenisM 7y ago
    Take a look into 5g, eg Verizon, - it’s aimed to be last mile competition, and have the same caps. Comcast is capped at 200gb, I imagine 5g would be similar.
    - jchw 7y ago
      It seems the cap is not a universal constant - my cap with Comcast is actually 1024GB. I honestly thought 1024GB was enough that I'd never actually get very close to it, but wow, I don't have a single month under 200GB. In fact, most months are above 500GB for me. Of course not everyone uses 500GB a month. But still, I think the data cap story has to change if 5G is really to compete with other last mile options. Also, Today, wireless providers segment the crap out of their market, upcharging for basically anything, including "tethering." With Comcast, for all of their many faults, I can at least use my own modem, connect my NAS and have it accept connections from the open Internet, and of course connect a boatload of computers and network devices with no problems. Wireless providers, to gain parity, would have to suddenly cede control and offer plans that essentially offer no restrictions with dedicated IP addresses. It isn't clear to me that this will be priced any differently from existing last-mile providers. It's not like good wireless plans are cheap today in the U.S. as it is. 5G may in fact improve wireless speeds, but the hype has been that it will be game-changing and industry-shifting and I just don't see it. I'm sure the market will get segmented up such that many people will basically pay the same amount or possibly even more than they did for effectively the same outcome.
starsinspace 7y ago
Same here. I see all this marketing hype about 5G but I just don't know what I would do with it. Maybe I could some day get gigabit internet on my smartphone then... but what for? Streaming 8K video on the go? I fail to see any use case, at least for me.
xoa 7y ago
I'll admit I've quite understood this ambivalence about WAN links, and particularly not on tech sites. Consider: would you find no different on your LAN going back to 10Base-T, or being restricted exclusively to 802.11a-1999 for all networking (no wired at all) in a spectrum crowded environment, and thus with double-digit latency at all times? Or is gigabit or even higher actually useful in a variety of ways? How about for your persistent local memory speed, is SSD or even modern HDD of no benefit vs something on PATA or IDE or whatever from the 90s? I don't think I'm going out on a limb in saying that yes, having more bandwidth available has and continues to be quite valuable. So then take that and remember that there is zero fundamental difference between LAN and WAN except latency based on distance and even that isn't that restrictive on Earth, particularly within a country. It's about 93 miles per millisecond RTT under ideal vacuum/air/photonic-bandgap fiber, or 70% of that in standard optical fiber, so 1/90 of a second say could easily be enough for a round trip to anything within a good 300-500 miles. And at a minimum, any application done on a LAN right now could apply directly. For a lot of the public for example thin-ish clients might actually make a great deal of sense for their "personal computer", just as it long has for businesses or certain home users right now, if only they had reliable high bandwidth connections. A lot of things that many people currently centralize could be decentralized again if it was ubiquitous that the population just WireGuard into their LAN from anywhere within a hundreds of miles or more and have an experience essentially the same as being on the LAN itself. I mean yeah, we can imagine all sorts of future AR/VR applications or enhanced privacy via onion routing and the like (essentially being able to burn some spare bandwidth on it for the same experience as present) and the like too. But is it even necessary to imagine that far? We use LANs right now, and that for most people there is a dramatic split in their LAN/WAN experience isn't down to physics (most people aren't going more then 500-1000 miles away with great regularity).
- com2kid 7y ago
  > For a lot of the public for example thin-ish clients might actually make a great deal of sense for their "personal computer", just as it long has for businesses or certain home users right now, if only they had reliable high bandwidth connections. A repeated dream. In reality thin clients suck even on a LAN. Remoting from a Windows PC to a Mac Mini sitting right next to it had unacceptable latency. Which is rather confusing given that modern machines can encode video at over 60fps.... Same OS to same OS is better, but not great. Every few years someone comes along and tries to deploy thin clients, and it never takes off en masse, good enough for a few limited scenarios though.

DenisM 7y ago

I remember the abundant “cell phones cause cancer” and “WiFi is like a microwave” scares 20 years ago, they all ended when people got their hands on nice and shiny touchscreen smartphones.

supertrope 7y ago
People notice short term tangible benefits. We're not maximally rational actors. People follow the group, authority figures, the status quo, and fear what they don't understand. A Facebook post is read much more than a 30 page peer reviewed statistical study.
- sascha_sl 7y ago
  What is a statisical study?
saagarjha 7y ago
Oh, they’re still around. There was a local group protesting the installation of a cell tower too close to a school recently.
- artursapek 7y ago
  Can you personally really be sure that it's not harmful long-term? Nobody has been able to study the effects of this stuff long-term.
  - DenisM 7y ago
    Yes. The physics of radiation and it’s medical impact is the single most studied subject in the history of such things, thanks to untold trillions sunk into research and development of nuclear weapons. Ionizing radiation cause DNA damage and cancer, the damage level can be both computed and measured. Non-ionizing radiation only causes temperature increase - lightbulb and microwave alike. The only difference is how deep the heat penetrates, and how many watts are pumped into the subject. The WiFi router is damaging in the same way as a very small lightbulb, and much less so than sitting in the sun.

zw123456 7y ago

One thing that a lot of people do not understand is that 5G can operate in any frequency band. In fact, for many 4G radios it is nothing more than a software upgrade, no change to the physical device or power levels, just faster and lower throughput.

toxik 7y ago
_Lower_ throughput? Care to elaborate?
- sipjca 7y ago
  I think he was referring to 4G having lower throughout. Saying 4G->5G for most modems is just a software upgrade for most modems is not quite accurate. The RF hardware itself is generally not a full SDR. There are predefined RF paths tuned for the bands in 4G/5G. So it’s a little more than a software upgrade. Theoretically this is possible but I think companies like Qualcomm are too worried about pushing their new hardware instead of software. I do think it should move in this direction and it would benefit companies like Qualcomm to do this by selling software updates.
- zb 7y ago
  I expect it was meant to say "lower-latency throughput".
  - zw123456 7y ago
    Yes sorry Lower Latency and higher throughput.
sschueller 7y ago
The fact that the general public doesn't know this is a failure of the carriers and FCC. Instead of clearly stating what the differences are and maybe not putting everything in the 5G bucket they got greedy and thought they could get it all. If the high frequency set was left out of 5Gs first round no one would have objected to the upgrade. I find the "We need 5G so we can have real time translation and autonomous cars" one of the dumbest arguments that can be made and it's pandering to an uneducated public. Why do we need more speed and connectivity for those things when we have better and better ML processors on Teslas and Google moving some voice recognition algos directly to devices? It's a bullshit argument.

amluto 7y ago

I find the argument that 5G is at all unsafe on a pole to be a bit silly. I think there are a couple of much more serious issues: 1. Is a millimeter-wave transmitter in a phone safe? The power output is moderately high, and these wavelengths are absorbed near the surface of your skin or your cornea. Cellphones are held near faces all the time. So I’d be much more concerned about using a 5G phone than about living near a 5G tower. 2. The 5G wavelengths May interfere with weather radar. I think that good weather forecasts are generally more important than cat videos.

stefan_ 7y ago
No one is even putting millimeter-wave transmitters in phones right now. But the more obvious point is that millimeter-wave 5G can only work with beamforming, and a beam that is going through your head where it is fully, entirely, fucking completely absorbed not a millimeter in, well, that's not going to yield a lot of throughput.
- sipjca 7y ago
  Um... Yes they are. The Galaxy S10 5G has a mmW radio in it that’s transmits mmW waves for the uplink. The 5G spec also requires certain protection when the UE (phone) Tx wave might go through tissue. But you’re correct that it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to attempt to Tx/Rx on a beam pointed at your head since it will lead to drastically lower SNR
EdwardDiego 7y ago
> these wavelengths are absorbed near the surface of your skin or your cornea And they'd cause a... slight heating effect. That's about it. So yeah, if you held your voice transmitting phone directly to your face for several decades, you might create enough tissue damage to up the cancer risk. But then the radio engineers I used to work with climbed radio towers with microwave emitters putting out far far far more energy than a cellphone, and their only rule was "don't stick your head or crotch in front of a microwave transmitter as you're climbing up".
- 7y ago

patient_zero 7y ago

The most important information in this piece is the FCC making rules favoring the very telecoms they are supposed to be regulating. Not that anyone familiar with this administration (or that scumbag Pai) is surprised.

superkuh 7y ago
Yeah, specifically the sub-6GHz C-band that it is basically ripping out of the hands of traditional radio media companies (ie, npr, etc) that use it for satellite distribution of radio shows. There's been a lot of complaints from radio people about this but the telcos have more money so they'll get it.
- lostmsu 7y ago
  Which also makes total sense to me: I use radio maybe once a year, mobile data once an hour.
  - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    Radio is used more frequently in poorer and more rural communities.
    - lostmsu 7y ago
      In the US? Do you have data for this? Do those communities even have cell coverage?
      - wahern 7y ago
        > 90 percent of Americans over age 12 listen to AM/FM radio at least once a week — down 2 percent since 2009. (This does not include public media, which Pew covered in a separate fact sheet.) Source: https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/07/am-fm-radio-holds-strong-for-american-listeners/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/07/am-fm-radio-holds-strong-f...

supertrope 7y ago

5G is both a buzzword and moral panic. This is hilarious.

dane-pgp 7y ago

Imagine you are the leader of a country with a large military budget, strong central control over domestic media and policy, but little influence over global technical standards or device manufacturing. Game theoretically, it would seem that a tempting strategy would be to spend money on influencing the debate in other countries to make them mistrustful of new technology, to slow their economy and relative growth. If the influence campaign isn't completely successful, then you get the additional benefit of having the populace divided amongst itself, and not trusting its own institutions, which further weakens their ability to work together and project power internationally. Surprisingly, this strategy also works against old technology too. Imagine if you wanted to cause health crises in other countries by convincing enough of the population to be afraid of vaccines that herd immunity is lost. I know this sounds like its own conspiracy theory, but it would explain a lot about some of the weird fringe views that seem to be popular on the internet right now.

H8crilA 7y ago
Fake news and unfounded beliefs are as old as humanity. Blood-letting, female hysteria, witch hunting, even the Y2K problem. People still read and believe the Bible, thousands of years later. There's nothing new on this front.
reggieband 7y ago
I know you're getting downvoted for this controversial insinuation ... but I must admit my mind went there while I was reading these comments. The amount of FUD in this comment section, especially at the top, is almost suspicious. I get it that 5G doesn't exactly match the hype, that the cost of rollout is high, alternatives like improving 4G coverage and back-haul from towers are available, there are hints of problems with saturating the air in such high-powered/high-spectrum radiation etc. But how a group of supposedly tech savvy, future thinking, entrepreneurial types seem single-mindedly focused on the negative aspects of a technology seems to not match the normal crowd on hacker news. 5G isn't revolutionary but it is the exact kind of incremental improvement I expect to see in tech. It has some benefits (higher speeds, lower latency) and some drawbacks (proximity to towers, interference from large objects, cost to rollout). The discussion here seems to be entirely limited to maximizing the drawbacks and to limiting the benefits. In my experience with tech, increasing speed and decreasing latency has always netted noticeable benefits. From CPUs, GPUs, memory access and network access - even small improvements in speed/latency have enabled major improvements in features. In addition, rolling out 5G is going to force the rollout of infrastructure enabling 5G, e.g. the fibre lines needed to supply all of those new base stations. For those reasons I am excited about 5G.

moomin 7y ago

This is what happens if a large number of people bear externalities and few get the benefits. Unsurprisingly, people block the changes. Countries that don’t slant the benefits directly towards the big providers don’t suffer from these problems. You can screw people over with regulatory capture, but it’s hard to hide that you did it.

m12k 7y ago

It's my impression that the vanguard of the anti-vaxxer movement have long since moved on to 5G as their battleground of choice. And to be fair, of all the places they could try to incite another mindless panic, this is probably the most harmless they could have chosen - at least this time around no children will die from it.

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api 7y ago
It's a shame that so much activism is spent on nonsense and even outright destructive nonsense. All that energy could be going toward improving things that matter. Of course I think maybe what we are seeing is the activist arm of what I've heard called "conspiritainment." It's a way for people to LARP as activists at no real inconvenience to themselves. They get to feel self righteous at no real cost. It also feels a bit like the domestic version of what I've heard Africans call "white savior tourism" where people from the West go to Africa to fill their Instagram with how they are saving the world. Picking a real issue usually means confronting and speaking truth to power. That often has real life consequences. Attacking windmills (even literally! that is a thing too!) does not. Edit: I once heard an investigative journalist and PI make this joke: "How can you tell if a conspiracy theorist is right?" "Check for their name in a missing persons database."
- The_rationalist 7y ago
  What you say is logically valid, why are you being downvoted?
  - guntars 7y ago
    People are just using the “I don’t like how this makes me feel” button.
  - reallydude 7y ago
    > It's a shame that so much activism is spent on nonsense and even outright destructive nonsense. All that energy could be going toward improving things that matter. I did not vote on it, but this is obvious pablem. An analysis of "why" is an interesting question, but aiming for platitudes repeated throughout every age in every society, is the epitome of discussion "noise".

Spooky23 7y ago

This is a shitty issue, because you have the uncertainty of health claims, with extreme claims that may even be ginned up to discredit opposition. My beef with 5G is the arguments for these disruptive rollouts are almost entirely bullshit. The United States is not in a race to drop a telephone pole with a short range antenna in front of my home. In the name of national security, Verizon and AT&T essentially get to do whatever they want, with no third party input. The FCC mandates lower rates for pole rent and allows new poles to be placed anywhere. In my case, Verizon put a pole in my neighbors lawn about 12 feet from an existing pole. Why does Verizon get a government subsidized ability to roll out infrastructure? Why doesn’t Spectrum or Comcast get it for their fiber and coax plant?

pas 7y ago
Any pending suits against this FCC decision? Or against Verizon for that unnecessary pole placement?

microcolonel 7y ago

I still have no idea what practical application makes use of 5G.

XCSme 7y ago
Playing the Chrome dino game as the connection will drop more frequently due to the smaller wavelength.
- ripdog 7y ago
  5g has a low-frequency version which has comparable range and wall penetration to 4g.

vermontdevil 7y ago

My next door neighborhood is filled with the stupid 5G debates. The ignorance of some of my neighbors is breathtaking. And I live in a highly educated neighborhood. Go figure. At least the mayor and the council is on board for 5G rollout due to the current poor reception of 4G among some providers.

XCSme 7y ago
Won't 5G have even worse reception due to the higher frequency/smaller reception distance?
- kbrosnan 7y ago
  With the current equipment and spectrum assigned it does have that problem. MKBHD goes over this is a video. It is awesome if you stand right underneath a 5g site, 1-2 gbps. If you head down the road a hundred feet/30 meters the signal drops to much closer to 4g speeds. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_CTUs_2hq6Y https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_CTUs_2hq6Y
  - mchristen 7y ago
    Reminds me of Sprint's rollout of Wimax technology. It was awesome if you had direct LOS with the tower and also kept your phone perfectly still. Eventually they canned it.

Wowfunhappy 7y ago

Nilay Patel wrote an editorial over at The Verge titled "Wait, why the hell is the ‘race to 5G’ even a race?": https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/23/18637213/5g-race-us-leadership-china-fcc-lte https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/23/18637213/5g-race-us-leade... > All I’m asking is that the next time you hear a wireless industry person talk about the “race” to 5G, stop and ask them why it’s a race. Ask who the competitors are, and what happens if we come in second place. See if you buy the answer. I suspect you won’t hear anything convincing. Faster internet is of course great in and of itself, but I'm not convinced it's deserving of public subsidies or regulatory exemptions, particularly in large cities that already have access to fast broadband. Furthermore, I'm quite concerned about NASA's warning that 5G will weaken our ability to forecast the weather, including life-or-death phenomena like hurricanes.

rolltiide 7y ago
yeah don't do this nobody at the T-Mobile store knows anything Its a fun thought exercise, but just smile and nod. The whole point of going into a brick and mortar store is just to see how the improv troupe will lie to you this time.
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  By "industry person", I don't think Nilay Patel was referring to standard retail workers. I read that sentence as targeted towards other journalists and professionals.
JumpCrisscross 7y ago
> I'm quite concerned about NASA's warning that 5G will weaken our ability to forecast the weather NASA issued no such warning. 5G would interfere with one satellite-based moisture measure around populated areas. NOAA’s commentary was around how that one measure would need to be statistically tweaked or supplemented. (The headlines resulted from NOAA’s head warning the Congress that if the latter didn’t give him funding for these tweaks, our forecasts would become dramatically worse.) Hurricanes, moreover, build over oceans. AT&T can’t keep a call in my Manhattan apartment; it’s going to be a while before 5G signals are making it to the middle of the Atlantic.

_bxg1 7y ago

There's such weird marketing zealotry behind 5G. They're acting like it's going to completely reshape society, but at best it's just... faster internet. In places where the internet is already pretty fast. I can only assume it's a mixture of political and economic stakeholders that have their own reasons for really wanting it to succeed (looking competitive against China, selling new phones, etc.)

didibus 7y ago
And honestly, they should start by improving home internet. It's already at the point where 4G is often more reliable.
- thekyle 7y ago
  Oh man. If I could get unlimited 4G home internet and have multiple ISPs to choose from that would be the dream.
  - asdff 7y ago
    That's the current plan with 5G.
thekyle 7y ago
I wish it was as easy to get people enthusiastic about other networking upgrades like IPv6.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Call it 6G IP.
  - antome 7y ago
    They can always rebrand it, like how 802.11ax is now "Wi-Fi 6" https://www.wi-fi.org/news-events/newsroom/wi-fi-alliance-introduces-wi-fi-6 https://www.wi-fi.org/news-events/newsroom/wi-fi-alliance-in...

corodra 7y ago

Reality is, it's also far more expensive to install 5g. It requires more fiber lines to run to more poles. Also, the telecom companies lobbied on state levels the max cities can charge for renting out putting stuff on poles. Plus trying to get cities to foot the bill. We are at the speed point of diminishing returns, 5g being said point. It's more money for not a real quality of life increase. I dont want my city to spend tax money on that.

nerdponx 7y ago
It's more money for not a real quality of life increase. I dont want my city to spend tax money on that. This is what it comes down to for me. We have housing crises, debt crises, infrastructure funding crises, and opiate crises all across the country. There are real and significant returns to investment on fixing those. Let's start there.
- corodra 7y ago
  Agreed. Especially the opioid crisis. I think it's a "relatively easy" problem to solve. I'm totally for tax money to go to people who truly want to get cleaned up and put on the right path. I think that'll help a good chunk of people with a well funded program of the drugs that help kick the cravings and a work reentry system. Much better than having my municipality or county pay for 5g.
proverbialbunny 7y ago
Do you think running more fiber to the last mile will give more people the opportunity to have gigabit fiber ran to their home?

Nasrudith 7y ago

The whole "aesthetics" thing against new technology always struck me as bizzare and selective given all of the far uglier things already in place that they actively like. It seems to be the Oscar Wilde practically satirical "Anything which is of practical use is ugly and anything which isn't is beautiful".

mooselumps 7y ago
I don’t disagree with your sentiment but the 5G modem pictured on a pole in Atlanta looked like a mess with lots of exposed wires. I’ve never seen anything like that outside of a messy set up in a home office. I’m fairly certain that the carriers could fit the antennas and wiring into a more clean looking packages to put on poles.

MrVitaliy 7y ago

This feels a lot like the battle of Blue-ray vs HD-dvd back in the early 2000s. While Blue-ray did win, it was less relevant to the industry than the original CD format. Things just moved online, flash storage and everyone got high-speed internet. If public WiFi becomes more ubiquitous, especially in densely populated areas, 4G vs 5G will be just as irrelevant as the battles for next CD format.

renaudg 7y ago
Handover on public WiFi is generally horrible, the tech is simply not designed for that kind of use. I spend half of the day with WiFi turned off on my iPhone because it catches weak nearby signals even when they're simply not strong enough to work. iOS has "WiFi assist" which is supposed to be smart about that and fall back to a cell connection, but that simply never works in my experience.
asdff 7y ago
Every disc video game is a blu ray, I'd chalk that up to a win.

didibus 7y ago

Can someone with know how tell me if 5G is actually good tech? I feel like carriers just wanted to launch a new product called 5G, and just threw together some not that great tech behind it. Is 5G actually innovative? Are we talking order of magnitude improvements over 4G? Cause right now all I hear is that 5G achieves faster speeds and added throughput by simply putting more towers and access points around. That doesn't sound like innovative engineering. At that point, just wire fiber everywhere and create a giant Wifi mesh network with an access point at every house. Like that would give faster internet, but not very innovative. Normally a good innovative tech would cost less, take up less resources, and achieve higher speeds and throughput. I'm not sure 5G is that from what I heard. EDIT: Even if you downvote, I am asking a question that I'm interested in hearing answers for, so please still try and answer my questions. Thank you.

renaudg 7y ago
Yes. Just got upgraded to 5G (from 4G) for my wireless home broadband, went from 5-10Mbps average and 20Mbps peak to 200Mbps average and 380Mbps peak. It's at least as big a jump as 3G to 4G was. The hype is real.
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proverbialbunny 7y ago
>Is 5G actually innovative? Are we talking order of magnitude improvements over 4G? 5G theoretically is similar to when cable modems moved from DOCSIS 2 to DOCSIS 3. Docsis 2 ran over a single channel (a single frequency range) and if that channel filled up it could switch to another channel. Docsis 3.0 allowed modems to bond to multiple channels at once, significantly reducing the ability for the line to fill up, and giving people much greater speeds. This is when average speeds in the cable modem internet world went from 12mbps to 100mbps. In a similar vain, 5G can span the entire frequency range (up to 96ghz I believe), so the closer someone is to a pole the higher their frequency range can span, reducing bandwidth on lower frequencies and providing higher speeds. Those who are far from the pole might be running 5g at the 4g frequency range, but because that will be only a few people far enough away, the bandwidth should be faster and more responsive, even on the 4g range. People on this thread are saying things like, "The more people that adopt 5g the slower it will go." but as counter intuitive as it is, the more people who are on 5g the faster everyone's speeds will be. All cell companies have to do is upgrade their existing 4G towers to 5G and over time everyone gets better internet, even if no more poles are laid out. Though, without more poles, the improvements could be mild.

PorterDuff 7y ago

Since I don't download uncompressed 4k video anymore, I'm personally getting practically all of the value of the internet (to me) from merely having a cheap cable connection at home. I've never been certain who 5g or fiber is really targeting. Amazon works fine, Netflix works fine, downloading an OS or language tool set isn't too heinous. High data speed to a phone is uninteresting, but YMMV. As usual, improvements become less useful on the margin. The one use case I've run into might be robot cars, probably lower latency/higher bandwidth. I don't know enough about where the intelligence actually lives or how much in the way of inter-car communications is actually required though.

nitrogen 7y ago
Faster upload speeds enable new applications -- easier high res streaming, self-hosted storage (stream from home to your phone regardless of whether what you want is on a commercial streaming platform), just plain less waiting when creating and uploading creative work
- richrichardsson 7y ago
  Faster upload speeds is something that I wish was more prevalent. Most ISPs that I have experience of prioritise download speeds over upload, but for my use case there is a point where increased download speed doesn't give me any measurable benefit, but being able to upload at a decent rate would be a huge benefit.

supernova87a 7y ago

What I want to know is whether -- as technology is supposed to -- 5G will bring me cheaper and faster cellular internet for all its hype. No? I'm just going to burn through my data faster, and pay more to the carrier? Why am I interested then? Isn't more access and more affordable prices the goal of the FCC as well? Why do many other countries have so much better and reasonably priced data?

coliveira 7y ago

5G represents the end of the oligopoly maintained by Comcast and Verizon. There is a lot on stake for these giant companies, and the fight will be ugly. Chinese companies have a clear advantage in developing this technology because they have a huge country with new networks developing, free from the constraints of an established oligopoly.

renaudg 7y ago

Really surprised to see the beating heart of tech that is HN turn into a luddite forum on this occasion. Last week I got upgraded from 4G to 5G for home broadband here in London, UK. It just became commercially available in my area (on Three) As I said in another comment, my average speeds went up from 5-10Mbps to 150-250Mbps and peak ones from 20-25Mbps to 350-400Mbps. It absolutely is the game changer it's advertised to be in terms of enabling new real-world use cases. Remember how video streaming was theoretically possible on 3G but totally shit in practice until 4G came along ? 5G is a similar kind of step up. You can expect an order magnitude more bandwidth on mobile than with 4G, and that matters. In other words : the hype is real.

povertyworld 7y ago
Is data going to be cheaper too? Otherwise, it's not going to change anything for most people. It'll just mean I can blow through my monthly quota in a day instead of a week.
- renaudg 7y ago
  This particular service doesn't have a quota, it's unlimited.
manmal 7y ago
My 4G connection in Austria has been able to do 120Mbps for years now, sometimes even 180Mbps. What you are seeing might simply be that you are mostly alone in your cell, and not really 5G related. Once more people have a 5G modem, things will get worse for you again.
- 420codebro 7y ago
  That was true with 3G to 4G, yes. But with 4G to 5G there is hope for relief in this area. One of the big features of 5G is the ability to handle a magnitude order more density with more "intelligent" frequency allocation, modulation, and (the big one) - LoS beamsteering. Of course, with all things in life there are tradeoffs. The tradeoff in this case is a 5G provider infrastructure radio every few hundred feet in urban areas to enable the LoS beamforming with the density factor required.

smkellat 7y ago

My city is looking at a total 5G ban. A city charter re-write is going to be needed to topple the current municipal administration. Moving to non-partisan elections would probably help since some of the current city council incumbents either didn’t graduate high school or only graduated high school over 50 years ago. Party structures protected those incumbents with this literally disconnected population.

tracer4201 7y ago
What city is this and what are their justifications for the ban?
proverbialbunny 7y ago
That's silly. 5G can be as simple as upgrading existing poles. No new poles need to be added, because 5G works on lower frequency ranges.

jorblumesea 7y ago

One of the most important points that is missed about 5g is what 4G did for us. It's pretty clear that the widespread adoption of faster mobile technologies has enabled technology companies like Facebook, Google, Youtube, Netflix etc to thrive. Investment in infrastructure has unforseen benefits that only seem obvious in hindsight. What will 5G bring us? Who knows. But if the past is any indication, it will benefit American companies if we invest in it. If not, all of that growth will go to China instead.

dubliner2077 7y ago

Drop my mind monthly bill and fuck 5g, I have all the speed I need and more than 64k RAM for my Phone.

tunesmith 7y ago

Regarding the health impact of cellular transmission, has anyone noticed that even the google search results for this are a total trash heap? I have a friend that turns off bluetooth transmission for all his devices every night, uses only a wired headphone for his phone, and even unplugs his wifi router every night. He's someone that doesn't know the difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation. I was tempted to make fun of him for all of this, but after searching on google and seeing what came up, I can't really blame him.

tzs 7y ago

Some of the fear of 5G is driven by Russia. RT has run several segments about it. Here are some: 5G Wireless: A Dangerous 'Experiment on Humanity' [1] Could 5G put more kids at risk for cancer? [2] How To Survive Dangers of 5G [3] Cancer risk? 5G wireless speeds could be dangerous [4] ‘Totally insane’: Telecomm Industry ignores 5G dangers [5] According to the New York Times, citing a declassified U.S. intelligence report from early 2017, RT videos on YouTube average 1 million viewers per day, and that is the highest among news outlets. They also say that lots of blogs and websites are picking up RTs claims and repeating them, without mentioning where they came from. Here's a Times story on this: "Your 5G Phone Won’t Hurt You. But Russia Wants You to Think Otherwise" [6] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_f9gpg4t6c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_f9gpg4t6c [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpXEyP0WMrk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpXEyP0WMrk [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aO1gZhwqCvI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aO1gZhwqCvI [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmLwuM0_MJg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmLwuM0_MJg [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML7wx_5n2z8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML7wx_5n2z8 [6] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/science/5g-phone-safety-health-russia.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/science/5g-phone-safety-h...

Joeri 7y ago
I’m reminded of the way the galactic empire in the foundation series descended into deliberate ignorance, with people actively turning their backs on technology, even while relying on it. Anyone up for starting the church of 5G and sending out priests to install cell towers?
- TwelveNights 7y ago
  Nucleics gave the people so much more than what 5G gives to us. I would imagine that it would be very difficult to impress anyone with the advantages it brings, versus being able to levitate and emit light.
- madengr 7y ago
  Well, I do RF for a living, and have designed some mmWave transceivers. Time to grow a long beard and through on a robe. I just need a chair that levitates.

achievingApathy 7y ago

Isn't this also a facet of our "war" with the rest of the world to be at the forefront of technology? There are those that think ceding being the first in things like AI would be so detrimental to the US economy that we'd never recover.

PGenes 7y ago

Would I be correct in stating that for 5G to be effective, the transmitter needs to be much closer to people than current towers. Also, there are currently legal limits on how much radiation may be transmitted by cell towers. It follows that it is not unreasonable that there may be be health effects. Arguments about China and Korea are actually quite scary because they provide justification for ignoring any health effects.

rayiner 7y ago

It’s very weird to see so many tech people siding with NIMBYs and hypochondriacs against technological advance. This is just a microcosm if a larger problem: municipal governments hold back progress. Right now, my Maryland county is lobbying to get veto power over a much-needed expansion of bridge capacity between the western and eastern shores of the Chesapeake Bay. Folks are also lobbying hard to shut down already-built light rail stations in the county. Municipalities make it impossible to densify urban areas, demolish obsolete buildings, build transit, build fiber, etc. Remember when San Francisco used to stop fiber deployment because some people thought the fiber cabinets were ugly? 5G is just the latest in a long list of things where a minority of loud voices holds up progress for everyone. Technologists are jealous of why places like Japan have such great infrastructure. They do because they don’t give local interests veto power over infrastructure. They don’t let environmental and historical preservation laws turn every attempt at infrastructure development into years to decades of litigation. Tokyo is criss-crossed with spiderwebs of fiber on utility poles. They don’t hold that up because some NIMBYs complained about the view. That’s how you make progress.

artursapek 7y ago
I can't stand the term "NIMBY's". What does that really mean? Is "NIMBYism" actually that surprising? When someone settles down somewhere and invests in a home, they will complain if you come in and try to do something to worsen their environment. What else can you expect? Is being a NIMBY just the opposite of being a pushover?
- jnordwick 7y ago
  Investing in a particular plot of land doesn't mean you get to veto everybody else's choices of what they do with their invested plot of land. Pure democracy violates individual freedoms. You do you, and I'll do me.
  - artursapek 7y ago
    Usually when someone invests in a plot of land, they're also considering what surrounds their plot of land. Obviously you don't own the rights to the surroundings, but it's reasonable to expect you would have something to say about it if those surroundings were to get ruined somehow.

DiseasedBadger 7y ago

I have heard suggestions, that the drive for 5g is to increases the density of wifi signals, since the technology developed for airport scanners can passively image people in areas of high wifi-signal density.

ranrotx 7y ago

I have this feeling that 5G is more about cheaply deploying faster Internet (ie. comment about these things going up next to people’s bedrooms) versus a more expensive fiber deployment to the premises. Having driven around Dallas and seen a few of these things in residential areas, I can say that yes they are ugly. Unlike a regular cell site, it doesn’t appear that there is any kind of permitting process around these deployments as they just pop up suddenly. I’m all for progress, but there are ways to make utility infrastructure less noticeable to the urban landscape. Unfortunately with the approach I’m seeing with 5G deployments, the telecom companies will take the cheap way out.

stjohnswarts 7y ago

It's just faster internet. They may have something with "aesthetics" but that smells of NIMBYism which is driven by rich locals when 75% of the populace has no problem with it. There are no health risks either, that is just the imagination of people who follow Alex Jones or who believe in crystal energy. The FCC needs to bully them.

Rustty2 7y ago

I've been reading by through comments and I see only one mention of hazard to physical and/or mental health. That one mention is "EM bullshit". Could I kindly ask for anyone to point me to a site/s that make you believe there is no potential harm to humans from 5G? Thank you in advance :)

amin226 7y ago

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