8 ms·

5G is perfectly fine

72 points by primMK 6y ago

Pick-A-Hill2019 6y ago
Firstly, Congrats on making it to the front page of HN, I guess you finally managed to work out the algorithms (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23417975 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23417975). In closing all I would add is this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23439437 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23439437
zw123456 6y ago
This is actually a pretty good explanation of why mm-wave is safe. An inside joke in the industry is that mm-wave can't propagate it's way out of a wet paper bag. Which is quite literally true. One might wonder then, what is the attraction of using a band that has such limited propagation properties ? The answer is that wireless technology is reaching the Shannon limit, that is to say 4G/LTE is approaching the physical limit of how much information can be packed into a Mhz of spectrum. The solution is to use beam forming. If you can dedicate the entire spectrum to a single user by forming a highly directional beam between the user and the tower then you can dramatically increase the capacity (hence throughput). But to do that you would need an enormous antenna. The laws of physics say that the beam width is inversely proportional to the size of the antenna for a given wavelength. If one were to try to create a 1 degree beam width using sub 6Ghz you would need a 12ft diameter (or square) antenna. Obviously that is not practical. But if you use a smaller wavelength then you can focus a tiny beam to a single user with a 1ft antenna. The trade off is short wavelength such as mm-wave have very little penetrating ability. So you have to place a lot of base stations all over the place. Expensive yes, but you get whopping through puts. But.. the signal could not penetrate it's way out of a wet paper bag, or through walls, or skin, or anything just about.
- 0xDEEPFAC 6y ago
  Ignoring the potential health concerns. 5G antennas need to be placed on every single city block low and close to people to be effective - so it is hopeless for a majority of the US not directly in a city unless we litter the entire suburbs and small towns in addition to our cities with Huawai equipment. And again, what is all of this for? Faster downloads of instagram photos? I don't get it. How about starting with infrastructure projects that matter like fiber - some people in the US only have DSL as an option... Following the Chinese WHO debacle and how much faith I have in the phone industry I, personally, don't believe the hype and the studies they produce even if they deem it "safe."
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > so it is hopeless for a majority of the US not directly in a city ~80% of the US population is urban, ~70% in large urbanized areas and ~10% in smaller urban clusters, per the census bureau. A majority of the US is not in a city only by empty land area, not people. Which isn't to say that it isn't important to also have solutions that work for the other 20%, but things that are only valuable for the urban 80% remain quite valuable.
    - __s 6y ago
      The person you're responding to wasn't saying that the majority of the US is not directly in a city, but that 5G won't be useful for the majority of that subset A third of the population isn't something to disregard. Their suggestion is that a holistic approach could be taken. But maybe this isn't too much an issue of resource allocation (ie 5G deployment may not be zero sum with fiber deployment, particularly if the considered regions are disjoint) Oh well, hopefully Starlink or something can help raise the floor on rural internet access quality
    - zw123456 6y ago
      I don't think 5G will be restricted to cities at all. There are some carriers who are already providing pretty good service to rural areas using sub6 fixed wireless. The N77 auction (3.7 - 4.2Ghz) I think will open up some very good competitive rural options. mm-wave will probably be too expensive in most cases but not necessarily always. The reason is because mm-wave being so fiber intensive. There is often a misconception that fiber is more expensive to deploy in rural areas but often the opposite is the case. Rural areas tend to have fewer regulations and restrictions that make deploying fiber a lot less expensive on a per mile basis that in cities. It's just that cities have more potential customers so it is the obvious first place to deploy. Although it will take longer to get there, I believe that fiber will work its way to more rural areas over time.
      - Dylan16807 6y ago
        > I don't think 5G will be restricted to cities at all. There are some carriers who are already providing pretty good service to rural areas using sub6 fixed wireless. That's a true statement but most uses of "5G" are talking about mm-wave. There's no question that lower frequencies, already in use for 4G or adjacent to those, will get the evolutionary bump to 5G. And don't forget to consider the need/benefit side. If your 2-7GHz towers won't be saturated, even a free pile of mm-wave antennas isn't worth the maintenance costs.
- schoen 6y ago
  > The answer is that wireless technology is reaching the Shannon limit, that is to say 4G/LTE is approaching the physical limit of how much information can be packed into a Mhz of spectrum. My understanding of the Shannon limit is that it depends not only on the bandwidth but also on the signal-to-noise ratio. If you had no noise at all (including infinite control over the modulation and demodulation process), you could modulate an unlimited number of bits per symbol within an arbitrary finite bandwidth. Like a QAM constellation with 2⁵⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰ points or something, all of which could in principle be accurately distinguished from one another in the absence of any noise. If the signal-to-noise ratio isn't a fixed thing for RF communications in different times and places, in what way is cellular communication newly reaching the limit now? I mean I understand that some digital coding methods are considered to be fairly near optimal for a given RF environment; is the idea that they previously weren't and now they are, so there's no longer much benefit to be had from engineering improvements in that area?
  - zw123456 6y ago
    Yes, exactly, I simplified it a bit for the limited space here. Basically C ~ B * SINR where B is the amount of spectrum and C is capacity. The reason mm-wave yields such whopping throughputs is 1. space diversity, that is, each user gets a beam 2. the dedicated beam means that one site is not interfering with it's neighbor (co-channel interference) . So if you can control the RF into a tight beam, the SINR is greatly improved. So it boosts both B because not you are not sharing B you get all the B available to the carrier in your beam and SINR is greatly improved because your beam is not being interfered with by other cell sites. You can not, unfortunately, modulate an infinite number of bits in practical implementations. The more QAM point require higher SINR to resolve. You can't have infinite SINR or Infinite Spectrum. Say you have 100Mhz of spectrum, in low band you are sharing it with others but also getting interfered by neighboring sites particularly at the cell edge.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
11235813213455 6y ago
There's also the fact that this will trigger a lot of new smartphone sales, compatible with 5G. This represent a future massive amount of pollution, for something not really necessary
- mrfusion 6y ago
  I’d guess most old smart phones get resold to third world countries. Not a bad thing. Or do you have evidence that they’re a pollution problem?
  - GaryNumanVevo 6y ago
    I think OP is referring to the pollution created refining rare metals, plastics, etc, that go into modern phones. Reuse is great, but reducing initial consumption is better.
    - 11235813213455 6y ago
      yes and freight
- ratsmack 6y ago
  We are burying ourselves in piles of obsolete gadgets. I buy very few computers or phones, but I look at the pile of stuff I've collected over the last 15 years and wonder how big the pile would be if I always bought the latest trendy items when they became available.
- oh_sigh 6y ago
  This isn't 5Gs fault - this is an argument against anything new and better than the the previous version. The real problem is that consumers are not charged the true cost of cleanup for their phones.
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    What would you estimate that is? Is it the kind of thing that could be paid for with an extra $50 a phone? Ideally along with some human rights enforcement.
wazoox 6y ago
Why 5G is dangerous : because mm-wave can't get out of a paper bag, we'll need a tremendous number of antennas everywhere, consuming a tremendous amount of resources and burning a tremendous amount of energy. For what benefit exactly? I don't want 5G. I'm very certain we have really urgent problems of climate, pollution, biodiversity, resources to tackle, and we certainly don't need any new planned-obsolescence systems. No to 5G. And of course, no to 8K TV.
- falcor84 6y ago
  I for one am excited about the opportunities for team meetings over AR, which to do right would require these higher bandwidths
  - mcguire 6y ago
    I would prefer to be able to listen to podcasts while driving in the vast, empty wastelands outside urban areas.
    - stinos 6y ago
      This sort of has been solved for 50 (wild guess) years with portable music players. Sure it is not exactly the same, and sure there's the extra recording step, but once that is done (which for downloadable stuff nowadays takes a fraction of the playback time) you have something which is better in some ways because it's offline. Don't get me wrong here: I'm not acvocating to go back, but in some ways it's strange to see new technology being used so widely yet people suffering to get things done which were actually better with older technology. Battery life is another one. The 2 of them combined in an example: I have a rather old portable player which takes micro SD cards. Even without swapping that's a huge amount of music. 2 AA batteries and the thing lasts for hundreds of hours. So purely for playing audio that solution really owns anything newer. Then again, it's of course also the only thing it does.
      - Dylan16807 6y ago
        It's also a problem that's solved by podcast apps, and in an even better way because they self-update your content. Definitely a shame that they make so many phones without microSD slots, though.
joyj2nd 6y ago
So you are telling us that Corona is not caused by 5G?
yumraj 6y ago
> The bottom line is, short of swallowing or embedding a 5G mmWave transmitter into your body and letting it run for a long time, you’re safe. But isn't the cellphone, which will have a 5G transmitter, be effectively next to your body all the time? In all of these discussions why do we always ignore the 5G mobile devices? And, what about when you're outside, standing below a 5G small cell, as you're taking a walk or kids are playing in the neighborhood, is it safe then? There is no wall between you and the antenna, just a few meters of air.
- yongjik 6y ago
  The world is already soaked every day with a vastly more lethal form of radiation, called sunlight. Ever took a nap in the beach without sunscreen? Compared to that, 5G is a non-issue. If your kid wants to stand right below an 5G transmitter for hours, for some reason, make sure that they use sunscreen, because otherwise they may get uncomfortable radiation burns from the sun.
  - Gnarl 6y ago
    Methinks you need to see this: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep14914/ https://www.nature.com/articles/srep14914/ Biologically, there's big difference between man-made and natural EMR.
- bildung 6y ago
  Mobile devices are ignored because they are regulated to only emit at most 0.2W. Compare that to visible light, which is the same thing, EM radiation, but because of the way higher frequency has 100.000 times higher energy density per Watt emitted. In general, there are only two way EM radiation can cause harm: Number one is ionizing radiation. That is, a photon contains so much energy that it can, upon hitting an electron e.g. in your skin, hurling it out to become a free radical. For radiation to be ionizing, it has to have much higher energy per photon than the 5G frequencies. Radiation starts to become ionizing at wavelengsth of about 300nm (i.e. UV light). The only other known way is through overheating tissue until it becomes damaged. As these frequencies are absorbed by water, which is part of practically every cell, this already happens in the skin - and if your skin warms up into damaging territory, you would definitely feel that.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jrockway 6y ago
Someone posted: "why do we need this?" By the time I was done writing my reply, they deleted their comment and HN wouldn't let me reply. But here is my reply: The demand comes from the fact that the vast majority of the world uses a cell phone as their primary computer. Paying for the Internet twice is a luxury they cannot afford. So it makes sense that the phone companies want to serve them. There is a fixed amount of spectrum available at lower frequencies that can travel longer distances, and we've used all that. So now the idea is to exploit higher frequencies where more bandwidth is available, but the trade-off is that the signals don't travel as far (attenuation by building surfaces, and even the air itself). So access points have to be closer together. The reality is that WiFi has never worked very well. Bandwidth is allocated poorly, mostly by accident. (Claiming there are 11 channels at 2.4GHz was a big lie that cost us dearly. Bad defaults at 5GHz led people to believe it was attenuated by walls, which it really isn't -- APs just chose channels that they were only allowed to use at lower power than the 2.4GHz channels.) Any time you've seen WiFi working well involves careful site surveys and complicated software that coordinates access over a backhaul (usually wired for the ones that work, but dual radio APs that use wireless backhaul appear to work in the lab -- nobody that I know of is selling them though). 5G is basically that, but owned by the incumbent carriers instead of individuals. They can coordinate access and steer devices to the right AP, which is the #1 thing that makes short-haul radio links reliable. I agree that the circumstances suck, but funding hardware R&D has to be paid for by someone. If you want to start a company to make a peer-to-peer radio network, I say go for it. People are interested. The hardware exists. But I think you'll find that to make money, you're going to have to charge people for access, and probably provide some sort of fallback to 4G/3G for people that are out of your service area. Guess who can provide that? The incumbents. So that's why they're doing it. It's not all bad, though. Someone has to provide backhaul for the APs, and they're often fiber. So fiber is not going away, and the technology will not stop being developed. It is likely that the fiber ISP that sells service to the cell phone companies will also be happy to sell it to you. It really comes down to how easy it is to lay the fiber to your location. In some cities, they built subways under every street for power and Internet (Manhattan has a huge network). In environments like that, it's easy for anyone to sell you a connection. I worked for an ISP that did exactly that, and it was great. The biggest barrier we had was buildings wanting to charge the ISP to provide service to the building. That isn't profitable for the ISP, so they simply say they can't serve you. My TL;DR is: encourage your municipality to make it easy to provide fiber to your location, and someone will. You can buy the necessary equipment to start a fiber ISP with a credit card. I say go for it.
hootbootscoot 6y ago
Nice, but I would have started in with explaining the electromagnetic spectrum, what photons are, what frequency is, where the visible light spectrum starts, how it's bounded by infrared at the bottom and uv above it, what "ionizing" radiation is, where on the frequency band it starts, what else starts around that band (photosynthesis) as a result of photon quanta finally being able to alter electron valences being at specific quanta, why etc, how ionizing radiation damages molecules, radiosynthesis and melanin-containing-fungi that grow on reactor walls, etc. basically, reassuring those prone towards conspiracy cult beliefs due to insufficient science education and a general bent towards such theories will tend to backfire. just saying "it's ok" won't work. break it down and immunize them to future silly beliefs due to understanding the electromagnetic spectrum, etc. once they understand that everything below visible light just makes molecules wiggle, spin, hop, MOVE around, and doesn't structurally alter them then when some random youtuber says "absorbtion band oxygen water bla bla" you can understand that it's a low-efficiency microwave oven at best, lol the other thing is: a tendency for those without a basic science education to presume that all of humanity is equally ignorant of this stuff. one can show them photos of how we learned this stuff the hard way, ranging from Mdm Curie to the hapless armed services assistants to various Manhattan project tests etc. not to mention the denizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, etc. We learned about the high absorption band around 60ghz back in submarine communications 101 as that range won't work for long range comm...
- Gnarl 6y ago
  Ionizing RF not required for DNA damage. Think biology, not oldschool physics & see here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279863242_Oxidative_mechanisms_of_biological_activity_of_low-intensity_radiofrequency_radiation https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279863242_Oxidative... TLDR; "Analysis of the currently available peer-reviewed scientific literature reveals molecular effects induced by low-intensity RFR in living cells; this includes significant activation of key pathways generating reactive oxygen species (ROS), activation of peroxidation, oxidative damage of DNA and changes in the activity of antioxidant enzymes. It indicates that among 100 currently available peer-reviewed studies dealing with oxidative effects of low-intensity RFR, in general, 93 confirmed that RFR induces oxidative effects in biological systems."
cuspy 6y ago
The 5G scare is to some extent part of an exploitative, manipulative health-concern industry. However, people are generally right to be afraid of the potential health effects of new technologies and substances that are released into their environments. It is extremely unethical and dangerous in my opinion to attempt to shame and censor people or pathologize their "paranoia". In most cases, despite being cynically exploited, what we're talking about is a healthy and sensible self-protective instinct. I feel safer in my society when people are free to discuss these fears without shame When talking to a skeptic, if you are certain that a particular fear is illegitimate, be specific as to why and don't use shame to seek compliance. In many cases you'll probably find that you yourself lack the ability to clearly explain why you think their skepticism is unfounded. We all know from countless examples, even in recent history, that there are many people and organizations willing to physically harm the public's health in various ways for profit. What I wish we would all be concerned with is not the health effects, but instead the potential for dramatically increased surveillance and control that comes with access to so much more bandwidth. Carelessly normalizing and naturalizing progress for progress's sake undermines the credibility of science and technology as tools for the greater good. More and more people are turning against us. Second, it's also my opinion we should be concerned that certain crucial decisions about our urban environments are exempt from even the pretense of local democratic control. I for one do not want to live in a city where critical infrastructure is governed by a large top-down international private corporate consensus, but it seems that's where we are headed.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

72 points by primMK 6y ago

Pick-A-Hill2019 6y ago

Firstly, Congrats on making it to the front page of HN, I guess you finally managed to work out the algorithms (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23417975 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23417975). In closing all I would add is this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23439437 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23439437

zw123456 6y ago

This is actually a pretty good explanation of why mm-wave is safe. An inside joke in the industry is that mm-wave can't propagate it's way out of a wet paper bag. Which is quite literally true. One might wonder then, what is the attraction of using a band that has such limited propagation properties ? The answer is that wireless technology is reaching the Shannon limit, that is to say 4G/LTE is approaching the physical limit of how much information can be packed into a Mhz of spectrum. The solution is to use beam forming. If you can dedicate the entire spectrum to a single user by forming a highly directional beam between the user and the tower then you can dramatically increase the capacity (hence throughput). But to do that you would need an enormous antenna. The laws of physics say that the beam width is inversely proportional to the size of the antenna for a given wavelength. If one were to try to create a 1 degree beam width using sub 6Ghz you would need a 12ft diameter (or square) antenna. Obviously that is not practical. But if you use a smaller wavelength then you can focus a tiny beam to a single user with a 1ft antenna. The trade off is short wavelength such as mm-wave have very little penetrating ability. So you have to place a lot of base stations all over the place. Expensive yes, but you get whopping through puts. But.. the signal could not penetrate it's way out of a wet paper bag, or through walls, or skin, or anything just about.

0xDEEPFAC 6y ago
Ignoring the potential health concerns. 5G antennas need to be placed on every single city block low and close to people to be effective - so it is hopeless for a majority of the US not directly in a city unless we litter the entire suburbs and small towns in addition to our cities with Huawai equipment. And again, what is all of this for? Faster downloads of instagram photos? I don't get it. How about starting with infrastructure projects that matter like fiber - some people in the US only have DSL as an option... Following the Chinese WHO debacle and how much faith I have in the phone industry I, personally, don't believe the hype and the studies they produce even if they deem it "safe."
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > so it is hopeless for a majority of the US not directly in a city ~80% of the US population is urban, ~70% in large urbanized areas and ~10% in smaller urban clusters, per the census bureau. A majority of the US is not in a city only by empty land area, not people. Which isn't to say that it isn't important to also have solutions that work for the other 20%, but things that are only valuable for the urban 80% remain quite valuable.
  - __s 6y ago
    The person you're responding to wasn't saying that the majority of the US is not directly in a city, but that 5G won't be useful for the majority of that subset A third of the population isn't something to disregard. Their suggestion is that a holistic approach could be taken. But maybe this isn't too much an issue of resource allocation (ie 5G deployment may not be zero sum with fiber deployment, particularly if the considered regions are disjoint) Oh well, hopefully Starlink or something can help raise the floor on rural internet access quality
  - zw123456 6y ago
    I don't think 5G will be restricted to cities at all. There are some carriers who are already providing pretty good service to rural areas using sub6 fixed wireless. The N77 auction (3.7 - 4.2Ghz) I think will open up some very good competitive rural options. mm-wave will probably be too expensive in most cases but not necessarily always. The reason is because mm-wave being so fiber intensive. There is often a misconception that fiber is more expensive to deploy in rural areas but often the opposite is the case. Rural areas tend to have fewer regulations and restrictions that make deploying fiber a lot less expensive on a per mile basis that in cities. It's just that cities have more potential customers so it is the obvious first place to deploy. Although it will take longer to get there, I believe that fiber will work its way to more rural areas over time.
    - Dylan16807 6y ago
      > I don't think 5G will be restricted to cities at all. There are some carriers who are already providing pretty good service to rural areas using sub6 fixed wireless. That's a true statement but most uses of "5G" are talking about mm-wave. There's no question that lower frequencies, already in use for 4G or adjacent to those, will get the evolutionary bump to 5G. And don't forget to consider the need/benefit side. If your 2-7GHz towers won't be saturated, even a free pile of mm-wave antennas isn't worth the maintenance costs.
schoen 6y ago
> The answer is that wireless technology is reaching the Shannon limit, that is to say 4G/LTE is approaching the physical limit of how much information can be packed into a Mhz of spectrum. My understanding of the Shannon limit is that it depends not only on the bandwidth but also on the signal-to-noise ratio. If you had no noise at all (including infinite control over the modulation and demodulation process), you could modulate an unlimited number of bits per symbol within an arbitrary finite bandwidth. Like a QAM constellation with 2⁵⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰ points or something, all of which could in principle be accurately distinguished from one another in the absence of any noise. If the signal-to-noise ratio isn't a fixed thing for RF communications in different times and places, in what way is cellular communication newly reaching the limit now? I mean I understand that some digital coding methods are considered to be fairly near optimal for a given RF environment; is the idea that they previously weren't and now they are, so there's no longer much benefit to be had from engineering improvements in that area?
- zw123456 6y ago
  Yes, exactly, I simplified it a bit for the limited space here. Basically C ~ B * SINR where B is the amount of spectrum and C is capacity. The reason mm-wave yields such whopping throughputs is 1. space diversity, that is, each user gets a beam 2. the dedicated beam means that one site is not interfering with it's neighbor (co-channel interference) . So if you can control the RF into a tight beam, the SINR is greatly improved. So it boosts both B because not you are not sharing B you get all the B available to the carrier in your beam and SINR is greatly improved because your beam is not being interfered with by other cell sites. You can not, unfortunately, modulate an infinite number of bits in practical implementations. The more QAM point require higher SINR to resolve. You can't have infinite SINR or Infinite Spectrum. Say you have 100Mhz of spectrum, in low band you are sharing it with others but also getting interfered by neighboring sites particularly at the cell edge.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

11235813213455 6y ago

There's also the fact that this will trigger a lot of new smartphone sales, compatible with 5G. This represent a future massive amount of pollution, for something not really necessary

mrfusion 6y ago
I’d guess most old smart phones get resold to third world countries. Not a bad thing. Or do you have evidence that they’re a pollution problem?
- GaryNumanVevo 6y ago
  I think OP is referring to the pollution created refining rare metals, plastics, etc, that go into modern phones. Reuse is great, but reducing initial consumption is better.
  - 11235813213455 6y ago
    yes and freight
ratsmack 6y ago
We are burying ourselves in piles of obsolete gadgets. I buy very few computers or phones, but I look at the pile of stuff I've collected over the last 15 years and wonder how big the pile would be if I always bought the latest trendy items when they became available.
oh_sigh 6y ago
This isn't 5Gs fault - this is an argument against anything new and better than the the previous version. The real problem is that consumers are not charged the true cost of cleanup for their phones.
- Dylan16807 6y ago
  What would you estimate that is? Is it the kind of thing that could be paid for with an extra $50 a phone? Ideally along with some human rights enforcement.

wazoox 6y ago

Why 5G is dangerous : because mm-wave can't get out of a paper bag, we'll need a tremendous number of antennas everywhere, consuming a tremendous amount of resources and burning a tremendous amount of energy. For what benefit exactly? I don't want 5G. I'm very certain we have really urgent problems of climate, pollution, biodiversity, resources to tackle, and we certainly don't need any new planned-obsolescence systems. No to 5G. And of course, no to 8K TV.

falcor84 6y ago
I for one am excited about the opportunities for team meetings over AR, which to do right would require these higher bandwidths
- mcguire 6y ago
  I would prefer to be able to listen to podcasts while driving in the vast, empty wastelands outside urban areas.
  - stinos 6y ago
    This sort of has been solved for 50 (wild guess) years with portable music players. Sure it is not exactly the same, and sure there's the extra recording step, but once that is done (which for downloadable stuff nowadays takes a fraction of the playback time) you have something which is better in some ways because it's offline. Don't get me wrong here: I'm not acvocating to go back, but in some ways it's strange to see new technology being used so widely yet people suffering to get things done which were actually better with older technology. Battery life is another one. The 2 of them combined in an example: I have a rather old portable player which takes micro SD cards. Even without swapping that's a huge amount of music. 2 AA batteries and the thing lasts for hundreds of hours. So purely for playing audio that solution really owns anything newer. Then again, it's of course also the only thing it does.
    - Dylan16807 6y ago
      It's also a problem that's solved by podcast apps, and in an even better way because they self-update your content. Definitely a shame that they make so many phones without microSD slots, though.

joyj2nd 6y ago

So you are telling us that Corona is not caused by 5G?

yumraj 6y ago

> The bottom line is, short of swallowing or embedding a 5G mmWave transmitter into your body and letting it run for a long time, you’re safe. But isn't the cellphone, which will have a 5G transmitter, be effectively next to your body all the time? In all of these discussions why do we always ignore the 5G mobile devices? And, what about when you're outside, standing below a 5G small cell, as you're taking a walk or kids are playing in the neighborhood, is it safe then? There is no wall between you and the antenna, just a few meters of air.

yongjik 6y ago
The world is already soaked every day with a vastly more lethal form of radiation, called sunlight. Ever took a nap in the beach without sunscreen? Compared to that, 5G is a non-issue. If your kid wants to stand right below an 5G transmitter for hours, for some reason, make sure that they use sunscreen, because otherwise they may get uncomfortable radiation burns from the sun.
- Gnarl 6y ago
  Methinks you need to see this: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep14914/ https://www.nature.com/articles/srep14914/ Biologically, there's big difference between man-made and natural EMR.
bildung 6y ago
Mobile devices are ignored because they are regulated to only emit at most 0.2W. Compare that to visible light, which is the same thing, EM radiation, but because of the way higher frequency has 100.000 times higher energy density per Watt emitted. In general, there are only two way EM radiation can cause harm: Number one is ionizing radiation. That is, a photon contains so much energy that it can, upon hitting an electron e.g. in your skin, hurling it out to become a free radical. For radiation to be ionizing, it has to have much higher energy per photon than the 5G frequencies. Radiation starts to become ionizing at wavelengsth of about 300nm (i.e. UV light). The only other known way is through overheating tissue until it becomes damaged. As these frequencies are absorbed by water, which is part of practically every cell, this already happens in the skin - and if your skin warms up into damaging territory, you would definitely feel that.

deleted 6y ago

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jrockway 6y ago

Someone posted: "why do we need this?" By the time I was done writing my reply, they deleted their comment and HN wouldn't let me reply. But here is my reply: The demand comes from the fact that the vast majority of the world uses a cell phone as their primary computer. Paying for the Internet twice is a luxury they cannot afford. So it makes sense that the phone companies want to serve them. There is a fixed amount of spectrum available at lower frequencies that can travel longer distances, and we've used all that. So now the idea is to exploit higher frequencies where more bandwidth is available, but the trade-off is that the signals don't travel as far (attenuation by building surfaces, and even the air itself). So access points have to be closer together. The reality is that WiFi has never worked very well. Bandwidth is allocated poorly, mostly by accident. (Claiming there are 11 channels at 2.4GHz was a big lie that cost us dearly. Bad defaults at 5GHz led people to believe it was attenuated by walls, which it really isn't -- APs just chose channels that they were only allowed to use at lower power than the 2.4GHz channels.) Any time you've seen WiFi working well involves careful site surveys and complicated software that coordinates access over a backhaul (usually wired for the ones that work, but dual radio APs that use wireless backhaul appear to work in the lab -- nobody that I know of is selling them though). 5G is basically that, but owned by the incumbent carriers instead of individuals. They can coordinate access and steer devices to the right AP, which is the #1 thing that makes short-haul radio links reliable. I agree that the circumstances suck, but funding hardware R&D has to be paid for by someone. If you want to start a company to make a peer-to-peer radio network, I say go for it. People are interested. The hardware exists. But I think you'll find that to make money, you're going to have to charge people for access, and probably provide some sort of fallback to 4G/3G for people that are out of your service area. Guess who can provide that? The incumbents. So that's why they're doing it. It's not all bad, though. Someone has to provide backhaul for the APs, and they're often fiber. So fiber is not going away, and the technology will not stop being developed. It is likely that the fiber ISP that sells service to the cell phone companies will also be happy to sell it to you. It really comes down to how easy it is to lay the fiber to your location. In some cities, they built subways under every street for power and Internet (Manhattan has a huge network). In environments like that, it's easy for anyone to sell you a connection. I worked for an ISP that did exactly that, and it was great. The biggest barrier we had was buildings wanting to charge the ISP to provide service to the building. That isn't profitable for the ISP, so they simply say they can't serve you. My TL;DR is: encourage your municipality to make it easy to provide fiber to your location, and someone will. You can buy the necessary equipment to start a fiber ISP with a credit card. I say go for it.

hootbootscoot 6y ago

Nice, but I would have started in with explaining the electromagnetic spectrum, what photons are, what frequency is, where the visible light spectrum starts, how it's bounded by infrared at the bottom and uv above it, what "ionizing" radiation is, where on the frequency band it starts, what else starts around that band (photosynthesis) as a result of photon quanta finally being able to alter electron valences being at specific quanta, why etc, how ionizing radiation damages molecules, radiosynthesis and melanin-containing-fungi that grow on reactor walls, etc. basically, reassuring those prone towards conspiracy cult beliefs due to insufficient science education and a general bent towards such theories will tend to backfire. just saying "it's ok" won't work. break it down and immunize them to future silly beliefs due to understanding the electromagnetic spectrum, etc. once they understand that everything below visible light just makes molecules wiggle, spin, hop, MOVE around, and doesn't structurally alter them then when some random youtuber says "absorbtion band oxygen water bla bla" you can understand that it's a low-efficiency microwave oven at best, lol the other thing is: a tendency for those without a basic science education to presume that all of humanity is equally ignorant of this stuff. one can show them photos of how we learned this stuff the hard way, ranging from Mdm Curie to the hapless armed services assistants to various Manhattan project tests etc. not to mention the denizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, etc. We learned about the high absorption band around 60ghz back in submarine communications 101 as that range won't work for long range comm...

Gnarl 6y ago
Ionizing RF not required for DNA damage. Think biology, not oldschool physics & see here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279863242_Oxidative_mechanisms_of_biological_activity_of_low-intensity_radiofrequency_radiation https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279863242_Oxidative... TLDR; "Analysis of the currently available peer-reviewed scientific literature reveals molecular effects induced by low-intensity RFR in living cells; this includes significant activation of key pathways generating reactive oxygen species (ROS), activation of peroxidation, oxidative damage of DNA and changes in the activity of antioxidant enzymes. It indicates that among 100 currently available peer-reviewed studies dealing with oxidative effects of low-intensity RFR, in general, 93 confirmed that RFR induces oxidative effects in biological systems."

cuspy 6y ago

The 5G scare is to some extent part of an exploitative, manipulative health-concern industry. However, people are generally right to be afraid of the potential health effects of new technologies and substances that are released into their environments. It is extremely unethical and dangerous in my opinion to attempt to shame and censor people or pathologize their "paranoia". In most cases, despite being cynically exploited, what we're talking about is a healthy and sensible self-protective instinct. I feel safer in my society when people are free to discuss these fears without shame When talking to a skeptic, if you are certain that a particular fear is illegitimate, be specific as to why and don't use shame to seek compliance. In many cases you'll probably find that you yourself lack the ability to clearly explain why you think their skepticism is unfounded. We all know from countless examples, even in recent history, that there are many people and organizations willing to physically harm the public's health in various ways for profit. What I wish we would all be concerned with is not the health effects, but instead the potential for dramatically increased surveillance and control that comes with access to so much more bandwidth. Carelessly normalizing and naturalizing progress for progress's sake undermines the credibility of science and technology as tools for the greater good. More and more people are turning against us. Second, it's also my opinion we should be concerned that certain crucial decisions about our urban environments are exempt from even the pretense of local democratic control. I for one do not want to live in a city where critical infrastructure is governed by a large top-down international private corporate consensus, but it seems that's where we are headed.

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