17 ms·

First of all, this is an excellent explanation of 5G that anyone moderately technical can understand. Great article. That said, do the numbers from the article

First of all, this is an excellent explanation of 5G that anyone moderately technical can understand. Great article. That said, do the numbers from the article concern anyone else at all? I'm generally all for progress, but more than 1 million devices per km2? And massive MIMO antenna arrays spraying EM waves in every part of the spectrum from 600 MHz to 50 GHz? More than a million devices per km2 ~= 3 million devices per square mile. Am I the only one that thinks that's a bit crazy? I don't want everything from my toaster to my door to my water bottle to be transmitting massive amounts of information to who knows where all the time. More concerning: the antennas. Current regular MIMO 4G towers are 2x2 or 4x4. Already, there are 5G towers installed today that are 128x128. These are planned to be spaced -extremely- densely in cities, and very close to people (on every floor of offices, on lampposts, etc.) This is a necessity due to the spectrum used. And not only that, but they're using new spectrum that hasn't been used before - instead of the MHz to low GHz range we all know and trust, 5G towers will be up to near 50 GHz (!). Especially the fact that millimeter wave/extremely high frequency is normally blocked by everything from drywall to glass, but now we're intentionally aiming massive amounts of EHF waves with hundreds of antennas in a small space. Call me a luddite, but I'm more and more thinking that we need a high quality longitudinal study about any effects of this kind of stuff before we go from 2x2/4x4 at well known frequencies to putting 128x128 EHF antenna arrays every hundred feet.

oakwhiz 6y ago
I'd be more concerned with the fact that the increased quantity and precision of the antennas allows collection of extremely fine-grained location information.
- mNovak 6y ago
  This is an interesting thought. It wouldn't be more precise than the GPS tracker already in your pocket, but it does open up more info to people other than Google. Also as a note, regular MIMO (not "massive") wouldn't provide location information as the scattering channel is generally considered random.
ip26 6y ago
Yeah, I've been slightly concerned about those numbers for a while now. I am in the same boat as you; we think radio waves are totally safe, I get that. But the increase in background spectral density & energy is going to be huge. Makes me feel like we should up our certainty levels a bit more first.
- owenversteeg 6y ago
  Thanks! I'm glad I'm not the only one. And exactly - it's such a massive jump that it deserves a careful look, which it doesn't seem like it really has gotten so far. I'm not saying it's going to give people cancer, but we just don't know what it may or may not do. Maybe there are absolutely no side effects. Maybe it's even beneficial to health! Hell, exposure to enough EM radiation in the hundreds of nanometers range is actually a requirement for human health. But maybe it has a negative effect on anything from birds to bacteria to humans, and I think it's worth investigating that before we deploy it extremely rapidly in all of the world's cities. I mean, the #1 post on HN right now is how highly skilled engineers accidentally made the Golden Gate Bridge emit a loud noise that's blanketing the Bay Area. And that's a bridge, which humans have been building for some 20,000 years. And it's made out of one thing - steel - which we generally understand very well. I really hope there will be no side effects. But the chance that there will scares me a bit. 5G will be rapidly rolled out at enormous, unprecedented scale and density in nearly all the big world cities - and in 2020 most of the world lives in cities.
  - icelancer 6y ago
    >> I mean, the #1 post on HN right now is how highly skilled engineers accidentally made the Golden Gate Bridge emit a loud noise that's blanketing the Bay Area. No it isn't. The engineers knew this sound was going to happen. It was not accidental.
    - owenversteeg 6y ago
      Apparently the noise on the pedestrian path itself is powerful enough that some people report it is literally unbearable while walking in the wind. From what I've read, the engineers only predicted that there would be some amount of hum, not that it would be nearly this loud. And again, the things involved here are bridges (which humans have been making for some 14,000 years) and wind (familiar to humans for our entire existence.) 5G uses little-studied frequencies around 50 GHz that we really know extremely little about compared to the widely used cm-wave.
namibj 6y ago
Ok, so, for one, you're miss-understanding the MIMO designation, or at least miss-representing it's meaning. 128x128 means that both sender and receiver have 128 antennas. Not that it's an array of 128 * 128 antennas (16384). Also, the 128x128 5G MIMO deployments I could find were distributed deployments, placing remote radio heads very densely at relevant indoor locations. I assume they're referring to places like large train stations or shopping malls. Also, regarding the "massive amounts" part: there is little incentive to transmit more than a few hundred mW per channel, just because the mobile device needs to transmit at a similar level anyways, and there are battery and cooling considerations, even neglecting the cost of power amplifiers for these frequencies. And, the 1 million devices per square kilometer is actually just a dense, standing crowd. It's the average density that can be reached over any sizable area (putting a school class's phones in a box until the end of the lesson would imply some insane density in that box, but there'd be a limit for how many boxes could be arranged into a dense grid).
- owenversteeg 6y ago
  As the HN guidelines say, "Assume good faith." I understand the MIMO designation, and I am not trying to misrepresent it in my comment. I know that 128x128 is not sixteen thousand (!!!) antennas on one tower, but rather 256, half for rx and half for tx. That said, two hundred and fifty six antennae on one tower is far, far more (orders of magnitude, plural!) than the typical 2x2 or 4x4 4G towers deployed today. And keep in mind that this is certainly not "just" 256 antennae for one mall, because 5G is blocked by anything thicker than a post-it (the article mentions how future plans include deploying massive MIMO to each floor of a building, as drywall and glass both block many 5G frequencies!) The reality is that no matter how you want to slice it, 5G means moving from widely spaced 4G towers transmitting at frequencies we have used for around a century to hyper-dense massive deployments of large numbers of antennae transmitting at new and relatively un-studied frequencies. 4G towers are (mostly) kept away from humans getting too close; 5G towers will be on lampposts and on the same floor of your office where someone can touch them. I'm not saying 5G is inherently bad, or good, I have no idea. I haven't run a longitudinal study, but _neither has anyone else_, and that's what scares me a little. Look, the #1 post on HN right now is how highly trained, expert engineers accidentally made a bridge (one of the oldest human inventions, around for millennia) create an extremely loud eerie noise currently blanketing San Francisco. And sure, transmit power is low. But it's not just about the power. Today I went out and enjoyed a warming 1000 W/m2 of hundreds of-nm EM radiation all over my body. Then I accidentally looked at the source, which hurt my eyes and disoriented me. Later I played with a device of only 0.01W emitting highly temporally coherent EM radiation. I had to put on safety equipment, because it had the possibility to harm me, including permanently damaging my sight.
GuB-42 6y ago
Are you talking about health effects? I don't have a study on hand but I expect the effect to be less than lower frequency waves. First thing to get out of the way, these are not ionizing radiation. Basically, the only thing electromagnetic waves up to visible light can do is heat. UV is borderline. The question is what they heat. The general idea is that the lower the wavelength, the deeper the penetration. 2/3/4G frequencies will heat your insides, 50 GHz will only heat your skin. Of course the power is so that under normal conditions, the heating is negligible. As for the effect of millimeter waves, while testing this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Denial_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Denial_System they subjected people to massive (100kW!) doses of 95 GHz radiation. High enough to actually burn you, and yet, the adverse effects were minimal. If you are talking about technical problems, like interference, and how to deal with radio waves that are starting to act a bit like light. I guess that 5G is designed by people who know what they are doing. Simply that we are able to make it work is almost like a miracle to me.
- owenversteeg 6y ago
  Human health would be the first thing on my mind, but there are many other things it could have an effect on - everything from the neighborhood pigeons to trees. And yes, I am sure that 5G is designed by some brilliant people. Anyone getting that close to the Shannon limit is smarter than me. My hat is off to them. But the reality is that this stuff just hasn't been trialed in any real way. Sure, the US government found 600 adults to get zapped for a few hours and only injured eight of them. But how about living with it for ten years? What about different frequencies? 100 nm is a world away from 300nm which is a world away from 500nm. Sure, they trialed 95 GHz and it was fine. What about 48 GHz? 25 GHz? All the other frequencies being used? What about with 256 antennae transmitting at higher power than anything before, right next to you, day in and day out for a decade? One big claim is that all this 5G radiation is blocked by the skin, so we'll all be fine! Oh wait, what about babies? Turns out babies' skin is thin enough that mm waves can penetrate the dermis... Furthermore, ionizing radiation and heating are not the only two ways EM can harm you. Just look at all the news about blue light for one example! EM radiation in the mm-wave range is still far understudied compared to the cm wave range. Look, I think that 5G is probably going to be fine, health wise. But for something as big as this, it absolutely deserves at least one good longitudinal study. Of which there have been zero.
owenversteeg 6y ago
So I posted this comment because I wanted to spark a discussion where intelligent people consider the safety implications of 5G, which is very hard to find on the internet. Unfortunately that hasn't happened so far, so I decided to dig a bit more on my own. Step 1 so far has been Wikipedia, where I found the reassuring sentence "The scientific consensus is that 5G technology is safe.[99][100][101]" Unfortunately, after checking those sources it appears that one is a blog and the other two are news articles about the same event - a press release from the ICNIRP. Further research on the ICNIRP shows that it is a private organization that declared itself that it only considered the thermal dangers of RF in the cm-wave range, and any other dangers do not exist. And that is the common path to "proving" 5G safety on the internet: "the only way that this could be bad is heating; there's no heating; bam, it's safe, we're done here." The reality, of course, is that EM waves have many mechanisms of action. So far, we know of the following: - Ionizing radiation (nuclear weapons, x-rays, etc) can easily kill you or give you cancer - Non-UV visible light can increase skin aging, cause retinal injuries - Tons of EM waves can burn you or increase body temperature causing other problems (tissue heating) - Nerve disturbance from low-frequency RF That's four methods of ways EM waves can hurt you. Everyone is in agreement about that - no matter how you slice it, there's a minimum of those four. But that's a minimum. Relatively few good quality longitudinal studies have been run about EM waves. "Hey, can we put this weird thing in your home and see if it gives you cancer?" is a hard sell, I guess. But unfortunately there seems to be not one single high-quality, longitudinal study researching the effects of living with constant mm-wave sources. There are a few short-term studies, but most of these are on the order of hours (!) of exposure. One interesting thing I did find was a Swiss study showing people living near high voltage power lines were more than two times more likely to get Alzheimer's than people living just 600m away. While that's a completely different type of EM than 5G, it does hint that there may be more harmful mechanisms of EM radiation than we currently know.
- mNovak 6y ago
  Yes, but the "other mechanisms" of EM harm you list do not apply to mm-waves. Imagine being wrapped in lead to protect your organs from harmful mm-waves. That's effectively already the case; mm-waves can't penetrate skin, eyes or anything else. Moreover, the power levels you're encountering from a base station are minuscule. It's underappreciated as a miracle of engineering that we can reliably communicate with signals that are 10^-12 W. You're at more danger from a 10W fluorescent light bulb.
sireat 6y ago
I have this irrational fear of 5G for some reason and I consider myself a rational person with a pro-technology bias. This fear stems from a combination of factors leading to unknown unknowns: 1. Little benefit for consumers with 4G (this is admitted even by pro 5G side implementing the tech) 2. Thus leading to question - who benefits when your toaster joins road sensors in the internet of shit. Webcams already are not doing too hot on the privacy front. 3. Lack of health studies 4. The feeling of being pushed down consumer throats. 5. Last not least the fight between 5G providers/implementers at a state level . Why not at least do some health studies?
- pensivemood 6y ago
  >Why not at least do some health studies? Why do it when you can get by without doing it? You just need to use the "science" label here and there, and throw the word "peer reviewed" here and there. And nay be you will have to pay off (which comes up to virtually no cost to the entities in question) some of the top people in the research (Who probably are planted long time ago in various fields)...

oakwhiz 6y ago

I'd be more concerned with the fact that the increased quantity and precision of the antennas allows collection of extremely fine-grained location information.

mNovak 6y ago
This is an interesting thought. It wouldn't be more precise than the GPS tracker already in your pocket, but it does open up more info to people other than Google. Also as a note, regular MIMO (not "massive") wouldn't provide location information as the scattering channel is generally considered random.

ip26 6y ago

Yeah, I've been slightly concerned about those numbers for a while now. I am in the same boat as you; we think radio waves are totally safe, I get that. But the increase in background spectral density & energy is going to be huge. Makes me feel like we should up our certainty levels a bit more first.

owenversteeg 6y ago
Thanks! I'm glad I'm not the only one. And exactly - it's such a massive jump that it deserves a careful look, which it doesn't seem like it really has gotten so far. I'm not saying it's going to give people cancer, but we just don't know what it may or may not do. Maybe there are absolutely no side effects. Maybe it's even beneficial to health! Hell, exposure to enough EM radiation in the hundreds of nanometers range is actually a requirement for human health. But maybe it has a negative effect on anything from birds to bacteria to humans, and I think it's worth investigating that before we deploy it extremely rapidly in all of the world's cities. I mean, the #1 post on HN right now is how highly skilled engineers accidentally made the Golden Gate Bridge emit a loud noise that's blanketing the Bay Area. And that's a bridge, which humans have been building for some 20,000 years. And it's made out of one thing - steel - which we generally understand very well. I really hope there will be no side effects. But the chance that there will scares me a bit. 5G will be rapidly rolled out at enormous, unprecedented scale and density in nearly all the big world cities - and in 2020 most of the world lives in cities.
- icelancer 6y ago
  >> I mean, the #1 post on HN right now is how highly skilled engineers accidentally made the Golden Gate Bridge emit a loud noise that's blanketing the Bay Area. No it isn't. The engineers knew this sound was going to happen. It was not accidental.
  - owenversteeg 6y ago
    Apparently the noise on the pedestrian path itself is powerful enough that some people report it is literally unbearable while walking in the wind. From what I've read, the engineers only predicted that there would be some amount of hum, not that it would be nearly this loud. And again, the things involved here are bridges (which humans have been making for some 14,000 years) and wind (familiar to humans for our entire existence.) 5G uses little-studied frequencies around 50 GHz that we really know extremely little about compared to the widely used cm-wave.

namibj 6y ago

Ok, so, for one, you're miss-understanding the MIMO designation, or at least miss-representing it's meaning. 128x128 means that both sender and receiver have 128 antennas. Not that it's an array of 128 * 128 antennas (16384). Also, the 128x128 5G MIMO deployments I could find were distributed deployments, placing remote radio heads very densely at relevant indoor locations. I assume they're referring to places like large train stations or shopping malls. Also, regarding the "massive amounts" part: there is little incentive to transmit more than a few hundred mW per channel, just because the mobile device needs to transmit at a similar level anyways, and there are battery and cooling considerations, even neglecting the cost of power amplifiers for these frequencies. And, the 1 million devices per square kilometer is actually just a dense, standing crowd. It's the average density that can be reached over any sizable area (putting a school class's phones in a box until the end of the lesson would imply some insane density in that box, but there'd be a limit for how many boxes could be arranged into a dense grid).

owenversteeg 6y ago
As the HN guidelines say, "Assume good faith." I understand the MIMO designation, and I am not trying to misrepresent it in my comment. I know that 128x128 is not sixteen thousand (!!!) antennas on one tower, but rather 256, half for rx and half for tx. That said, two hundred and fifty six antennae on one tower is far, far more (orders of magnitude, plural!) than the typical 2x2 or 4x4 4G towers deployed today. And keep in mind that this is certainly not "just" 256 antennae for one mall, because 5G is blocked by anything thicker than a post-it (the article mentions how future plans include deploying massive MIMO to each floor of a building, as drywall and glass both block many 5G frequencies!) The reality is that no matter how you want to slice it, 5G means moving from widely spaced 4G towers transmitting at frequencies we have used for around a century to hyper-dense massive deployments of large numbers of antennae transmitting at new and relatively un-studied frequencies. 4G towers are (mostly) kept away from humans getting too close; 5G towers will be on lampposts and on the same floor of your office where someone can touch them. I'm not saying 5G is inherently bad, or good, I have no idea. I haven't run a longitudinal study, but _neither has anyone else_, and that's what scares me a little. Look, the #1 post on HN right now is how highly trained, expert engineers accidentally made a bridge (one of the oldest human inventions, around for millennia) create an extremely loud eerie noise currently blanketing San Francisco. And sure, transmit power is low. But it's not just about the power. Today I went out and enjoyed a warming 1000 W/m2 of hundreds of-nm EM radiation all over my body. Then I accidentally looked at the source, which hurt my eyes and disoriented me. Later I played with a device of only 0.01W emitting highly temporally coherent EM radiation. I had to put on safety equipment, because it had the possibility to harm me, including permanently damaging my sight.

GuB-42 6y ago

Are you talking about health effects? I don't have a study on hand but I expect the effect to be less than lower frequency waves. First thing to get out of the way, these are not ionizing radiation. Basically, the only thing electromagnetic waves up to visible light can do is heat. UV is borderline. The question is what they heat. The general idea is that the lower the wavelength, the deeper the penetration. 2/3/4G frequencies will heat your insides, 50 GHz will only heat your skin. Of course the power is so that under normal conditions, the heating is negligible. As for the effect of millimeter waves, while testing this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Denial_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Denial_System they subjected people to massive (100kW!) doses of 95 GHz radiation. High enough to actually burn you, and yet, the adverse effects were minimal. If you are talking about technical problems, like interference, and how to deal with radio waves that are starting to act a bit like light. I guess that 5G is designed by people who know what they are doing. Simply that we are able to make it work is almost like a miracle to me.

owenversteeg 6y ago
Human health would be the first thing on my mind, but there are many other things it could have an effect on - everything from the neighborhood pigeons to trees. And yes, I am sure that 5G is designed by some brilliant people. Anyone getting that close to the Shannon limit is smarter than me. My hat is off to them. But the reality is that this stuff just hasn't been trialed in any real way. Sure, the US government found 600 adults to get zapped for a few hours and only injured eight of them. But how about living with it for ten years? What about different frequencies? 100 nm is a world away from 300nm which is a world away from 500nm. Sure, they trialed 95 GHz and it was fine. What about 48 GHz? 25 GHz? All the other frequencies being used? What about with 256 antennae transmitting at higher power than anything before, right next to you, day in and day out for a decade? One big claim is that all this 5G radiation is blocked by the skin, so we'll all be fine! Oh wait, what about babies? Turns out babies' skin is thin enough that mm waves can penetrate the dermis... Furthermore, ionizing radiation and heating are not the only two ways EM can harm you. Just look at all the news about blue light for one example! EM radiation in the mm-wave range is still far understudied compared to the cm wave range. Look, I think that 5G is probably going to be fine, health wise. But for something as big as this, it absolutely deserves at least one good longitudinal study. Of which there have been zero.

owenversteeg 6y ago

So I posted this comment because I wanted to spark a discussion where intelligent people consider the safety implications of 5G, which is very hard to find on the internet. Unfortunately that hasn't happened so far, so I decided to dig a bit more on my own. Step 1 so far has been Wikipedia, where I found the reassuring sentence "The scientific consensus is that 5G technology is safe.[99][100][101]" Unfortunately, after checking those sources it appears that one is a blog and the other two are news articles about the same event - a press release from the ICNIRP. Further research on the ICNIRP shows that it is a private organization that declared itself that it only considered the thermal dangers of RF in the cm-wave range, and any other dangers do not exist. And that is the common path to "proving" 5G safety on the internet: "the only way that this could be bad is heating; there's no heating; bam, it's safe, we're done here." The reality, of course, is that EM waves have many mechanisms of action. So far, we know of the following: - Ionizing radiation (nuclear weapons, x-rays, etc) can easily kill you or give you cancer - Non-UV visible light can increase skin aging, cause retinal injuries - Tons of EM waves can burn you or increase body temperature causing other problems (tissue heating) - Nerve disturbance from low-frequency RF That's four methods of ways EM waves can hurt you. Everyone is in agreement about that - no matter how you slice it, there's a minimum of those four. But that's a minimum. Relatively few good quality longitudinal studies have been run about EM waves. "Hey, can we put this weird thing in your home and see if it gives you cancer?" is a hard sell, I guess. But unfortunately there seems to be not one single high-quality, longitudinal study researching the effects of living with constant mm-wave sources. There are a few short-term studies, but most of these are on the order of hours (!) of exposure. One interesting thing I did find was a Swiss study showing people living near high voltage power lines were more than two times more likely to get Alzheimer's than people living just 600m away. While that's a completely different type of EM than 5G, it does hint that there may be more harmful mechanisms of EM radiation than we currently know.

mNovak 6y ago
Yes, but the "other mechanisms" of EM harm you list do not apply to mm-waves. Imagine being wrapped in lead to protect your organs from harmful mm-waves. That's effectively already the case; mm-waves can't penetrate skin, eyes or anything else. Moreover, the power levels you're encountering from a base station are minuscule. It's underappreciated as a miracle of engineering that we can reliably communicate with signals that are 10^-12 W. You're at more danger from a 10W fluorescent light bulb.

sireat 6y ago

I have this irrational fear of 5G for some reason and I consider myself a rational person with a pro-technology bias. This fear stems from a combination of factors leading to unknown unknowns: 1. Little benefit for consumers with 4G (this is admitted even by pro 5G side implementing the tech) 2. Thus leading to question - who benefits when your toaster joins road sensors in the internet of shit. Webcams already are not doing too hot on the privacy front. 3. Lack of health studies 4. The feeling of being pushed down consumer throats. 5. Last not least the fight between 5G providers/implementers at a state level . Why not at least do some health studies?

pensivemood 6y ago
>Why not at least do some health studies? Why do it when you can get by without doing it? You just need to use the "science" label here and there, and throw the word "peer reviewed" here and there. And nay be you will have to pay off (which comes up to virtually no cost to the entities in question) some of the top people in the research (Who probably are planted long time ago in various fields)...