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5G’s Rollout Rattled Hundreds of Pilots

103 points by samizdis 4y ago

msh 4y ago
I find the airplane operators/pilot overentiteled. Why shut down 5G as some of them suggest if its the altimeters on the planes that are actually defective/not within spec.
- twawaaay 4y ago
  Ignoring reality isn't helpful. If we go this way we would have to defund highway patrols because it is waste of time (traffic rules already specify how to drive safely). You don't need IRS (because law says how to pay taxes). Also try to understand those pilots did not manufacture the equipment they are flying. They bought equipment that was certified to be airworthy or are flying for somebody who owns the equipment that was certified to be airworthy.
  - KennyBlanken 4y ago
  - Huh1337 4y ago
    So the solution here is to go after the planes/AOC holders that have misbehaving receivers and to force them to upgrade to correctly working hardware, just like we do with cars. Even if your car is certified, it will still get pulled off the street if it misbehaves - see Dieselgate. And company drivers also don't buy the cars they drive - nobody cares.
  - stefan_ 4y ago
    We are in this situation because the FAA is ignoring reality for some 50 years now. They think just doing nothing means nothing bad can ever happen; well, reality just caught up with them.
- xani_ 4y ago
  The airplane pilots can't do shit about it, it's up to their parent company to pressure company (and pay $$$) that sold them planes to fix it. From their perspective it worked for decades and now someone decide to jam it. From engineering perspective, yes, they are defective and don't have enough filtering on the input to stay within its band
  - p_l 4y ago
    From engineering perspective, the 5G equipment is not staying in its band, not radar altimeters. Remember that the regs for band usage are on transmit, not receive, and the physical reality makes radio altimeters especially hard to filter.
    - sidewndr46 4y ago
      I don't think you understand FCC rules about communications at all. You can't just freely snoop on someone's cell phone call because you are just receiving. There are all kinds of regulations around reception.
      - p_l 4y ago
        And I think you do not get the rules about frequency allocation, which don't care about separate rules related to snooping communications.
    - readams 4y ago
      No the altimeters are sensitive to frequencies outside their band. So 5g transmitting inside its band causes the altimeter to malfunction.
      - teeray 4y ago
        Many receivers can be affected by strong signals outside of their band. The strange analog world has effects like desensitization and intermodulation, which can produce in-band signals or attenuate the ones you intended to hear. The degree to which a receiver is immune to these effects is part of the engineering of the receiver. They likely didn’t consider strong C-band transmissions with a high duty cycle in their design at the time.
- avidphantasm 4y ago
  I want the pilots who have my life and the lives of my friends and loves ones in their hands to be entitled to whatever they need to safely do their jobs.
  - msh 4y ago
    Well their companies bought defective equipment, and now wants someone else to pay but not using a resource that the airplane companies are using for free. I see 3 solutions: 1: shut down 5G. 2: Ground airplanes with defective equipment 3: Make the airplane companies pay for the spectrum that their defective equipment needs to operate. Option 2 would satisfy flying safely and not put externalities on companies that had no fault in this. 3 also would but would not be very efficient.
    - mellavora 4y ago
      > Well their companies bought defective equipment No they didn't. The equipment worked just fine until people started broadcasting on a nearby frequency. Like if I put a jammer outside your living room window and your WiFi stopped working, would that be because you bought 'defective equipment'? After all, your router doesn't have the latest 'anti-jamming' error correcting codes built in.
      - msh 4y ago
        Unless I misunderstand the altimeters did not live up to the required specifications when they were produced, but as the nearby spectrum was not in use nobody really cared about this.
      - darksaints 4y ago
        It wasn't the equipment working fine that made it defective. It was the fact that they were using frequencies hundreds of MHz away from what they were allowed to use.
      - blantonl 4y ago
        The equipment is indeed defective. If your receiver is able to be overloaded by adjacent channel interference because you as the designed neglected to install a bandpass filter on such a critical piece of equipment, and it wasn't discovered until later when someone legally was granted a license to use adjacent spectrum, your equipment is WILDLY defective. Just because it took many many years to identify the failure doesn't give the manufacturers a pass. A jammer is a malicious, unlicensed product specifically designed to prevent your Wifi from working.
- upofadown 4y ago
  >if its the altimeters on the planes that are actually defective/not within spec. Is there any evidence this is the case? This sort of thing is a lot like property zoning. If a steel mill starts up next door to your residential property in what used to be a park then there is nothing stopping you from adding more sound proofing to your walls to make it so you can sleep. But should you have to do this and can you do this at all? In this case the neighbouring band was originally used for satellite downlinks. So barely detectable signals with large dishes required. Radar altimeters in aircraft actually used to cause interference to the satellite downlinks when the aircraft flew over. The fact is that you need to have sufficient physical separation between services in adjacent bands. In this case, you can't expect things to work if an aircraft flies directly over a 4 GHz 5G transmitter at a low altitude. This aspect of adjacent band interference is an important part of spectrum management. You can't just wave the issue away...
  - crote 4y ago
    Altimeters are allowed to use the 4.2GHz - 4.4GHz band. They are getting interference from signals at 3.98GHz and below. This means they need over twice the spectrum that was allocated to them. It's more like the family who is first to move into a neighborhood under construction, complaining that their kids can no longer play in the empty lots because houses are being built there. And it's not even the empty lot next to them, but one lot over.
    - chmorgan 4y ago
      This! The altimeters with issues are not operating to their design specs. No one noticed until 5g apparently but imo it’s on the altimeters, and not 5g, if they aren’t properly rejecting out of band noise/energy.
      - ominous_prime 4y ago
        Unfortunately these altimeters are part of a very large critical infrastructure, which can't be ignored. Just saying they shouldn't be working that way doesn't negate the fact that they are working that way. Part of engineering is taking the real world into account, even if the real world is inconvenient for you.
- ominous_prime 4y ago
  The planes were in spec at their time of production, and in working condition before the 5g rollout. Imagine carriers installing some new technology near highways which causes cars with a device installed before 1999 to occasionally crash. You can't just say "too bad, those owners should have upgraded by now". Regardless of what the specifications say, you can't rollout new technology without taking the real world parameters into account, and these were well-known parameters before anything rolled out.
- mihaaly 4y ago
  Probably because less harm is done if you have lower speed for browsing than when a plane crashes or the air traffic is decimated. But I am just guessing.
- awinder 4y ago
  If I inject a new feature into production and it destabilizes existing functionality, it’s the new features fault (and it gets rolled back). It doesn’t matter if I really think it’s the fault of the other component, or I would have designed it differently (especially now that I know the consequences!). Maybe we end up “fixing” the existing functionality and then proceeding with the new feature — but not until stable state is re-established. This is like standard practice for shit that is of trivial importance to humanity in a newish engineering field. So I don’t for the life of me understand the logic of being more flippant when it comes to human lives in a more established engineering field.
tomohawk 4y ago
> “I’d sleep like a baby [on a plane] that flew over a 5G base station at full power output,” he told Spectrum. “Probably something happens that’s unusual and the pilots attribute it to 5G but maybe it’s not attributable to 5G. After everything in the news, they’re now submitting what they actually see, whereas before they perhaps weren't motivated to do that.” This is just pure speculation.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
underscores__ 4y ago
_s 4y ago
I think there is some context missing from this; The 5G band that was auctioned off is only one step next to the band used by radar altimeters - essentially a piece of equipment on aircraft that gives it its precise height above the ground. Aircraft can and do have barometric (pressure corrected) and GPS altimeters as well (which are usually giving you your height above sea level - and knowing the height of the terrain you can work out your height above ground), all of which feed into the various systems allowing them to have an accurate height at any given point during the flight. This is most needed when flying “precision 3D approaches”, usually in bad weather when visual contact with the ground may not be possible until the wheels actually touch the ground. Autopilot systems that land the aircraft fly these “approaches”, and thus rely greatly on their height, speed and distance. These radar altimeters were mostly designed and certified back in the 80’s (or even earlier!) - and it’s a lot of work to have any equipment certified - especially today. Hardware + software back then was nowhere near as good as it is today, yet many of these altimeters still being produced today would be to the original spec from a few decades ago - which had a much wider tolerance or sensitivity to the frequencies, so when you have a frequency only a few steps away - a slightly older / worn equipment with perhaps not the best shielding will definitely pick up some surges from frequencies next to it. Blame the FAA for their archaic and slow, near impossible process to get equipment certified. Blame the Aircraft / Equipment manufacturers for not updating their equipment with the times, but that’s on the FAA for making this process difficult- see 737 certification as an example, leading to the max accidents. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G#Aviation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G#Aviation
- Someone1234 4y ago
  > FAA for making this process difficult- see 737 certification as an example, leading to the max accidents. The certification process being "difficult" isn't why the 737 Max was unsafe. The FAA allowed Boeing to self-certify its safety, and voices inside the company were ignored or silence. They literally created a system to save a buck for their clients then outsourced development of that system to save another buck, then rubber-stamped it themselves. Blaming this on too much or too difficult regulation is farcical. PS - I also find the entire thrust of this argument contradictory: "Equipment built in the 80s wasn't high enough quality for the new 5G operating environment, so we need to weaken 'difficult' regulation today to make producing lower quality equipment cheaper, tomorrow be damned."
ethbr0 4y ago
The rollout of this was disgusting. The FCC only cared about selling the spectrum. The FAA only cared about minimizing the chance of any accidents. Neither was able to look at the science, come to a compromise, and then implement it in a joint way. It took the carriers, who had just paid $80b (from the article) to inject sanity into the approach via voluntary buffer zones. Turns out, single purpose regulatory agencies aren't great at considering matters outside their area of focus...
- avidphantasm 4y ago
  It seems like this is a case of multi-agency regulatory capture (by industries with competing interests) resulting in behavior akin to a failed state. If the state can’t arbitrate conflicts over public goods, what good is it?
  - throwoutway 4y ago
    > If the state can’t arbitrate conflicts over public goods, what good is it? It could. Did anyone bring it to a court?
    - thatguy0900 4y ago
      Is the only way for the fcc and faa to come to a joint conclusion for someone to spend millions in court forcing them to?
      - dylan604 4y ago
        would it be really surprising if that was the case though?
      - throwoutway 4y ago
        Did I say that? Or am I responding to a extremely bizarre comment about the US being a “failed state” when parties found a solution without even exhausting the most obvious answer (given the US is a lawsuit-happy nation)
- 4y ago
can16358p 4y ago
So regardless of 5G C Band is indeed the cause or not, why aren't they testing it in a controlled environment? Make some test flights in good viewing conditions near those locations with the reports, and have turned on, data downloading/uploading 5G cell phones onboard using different planes/series and see if there's any interference happening. I know it's more complicated and costlier than that but since lives might potentially be in danger and since it's too late to change the 5G bands, it seems to be the only viable option. If it it indeed causes, C band can simply be banned near runways and say, be allowed inside the airport in low power settings if it doesn't cause interference with outside planes.
- karteum 4y ago
  The issue has been known and adressed in France for a while (and to my knowledge, France has been pioneer in handling the topic seriously. e.g. see https://www.anfr.fr/liste-actualites/actualite/la-protection-des-radioaltimetres-vis-a-vis-de-la-5g-les-nouveaux-developpements-dans-le-monde https://www.anfr.fr/liste-actualites/actualite/la-protection... ). 5G base stations have compliant out-of-band emissions so the issue is not "because of 5G" but rather "because radio-altimeters gather energy from adjacent bands" (something we call "blocking"). Not all radio-altimeters are the same, but for some of them there is very little filtering and the only thing that protected them from good old 4G was that the antenna behaves somewhat as a filter and 2.6 GHz was far enough from 4.2 GHz... It may sound silly for a safety-critical equipment, but we really have to think about the really long lifetime of those equipments and think with the context of the time when they were designed/deployed (e.g. if there is only space-to-earth transmission in adjacent bands, why would they put filters that would add insertion loss and cost ? In the 80's there was no 4G/5G in sight...). Probably the aeronautical authorities also failed to inform the relevant issue in due time within the spectrum regulation process, so this has not been known or studied properly at ITU/CEPT/etc in the context of those frequency bands close to 4.2 GHz. It also seems that the radio-altimeters vendors keep a lot of secrecy on the technical details of their equipments (a part of the internal culture which also comes from the dual civil/military use of those systems) so even people who represent civil aviation authorities or aircraft manufacturers such as boeing/airbus in spectrum regulation authorities do not always have full access to the relevant information. Now the situation is what it is, and the short-term solution is to have some kind of 5G exclusion zones around airports, and of course operators are not happy with this because they paid huge prices for 5G licences and now they discover that they have new/additional constraints around airports... Long-term solution is also an issue, because it is not that simple to put filters on existing equipments (if they change the behavior, the whole computer need to be re-calibrated, and pilots trained, and the whole thing re-certified, which is also not as simple of doing it once and certifying all aircrafts from the same model but really must be done one-by-one in a custom way for every aircraft). I understood that new specs for radio-altimeters will soon be out so we can hope that the situation improves soon as the retrofit will be able to start (even though it will take years), but there is a possibility that even new radio-altimeters may still continue to be vulnerable to blocking in 4-4.2 GHz in order to maintain their required accuracy (I'm no expert in radars but I trust those people who told me). So the issue will be solved with regards to 5G in 3.4-3.8 GHz as deployed in Europe, but maybe not above 4 GHz (which is one reason why it may be better to restrict to low-power/verticals in the future uses in those bands). Anyway, this is a complex topic as you see...
YetAnotherNick 4y ago
> anonymously share safety incidents and concerns Why? It is not like there is serious privacy violation in telling that altimeter broke, and this makes the data much less reliable. Not saying the data is fake for sure, but I have came across enough haters of 5g, and I am pretty sure someone could post fake entries just to scare people.
- jwn 4y ago
  ASRS (https://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/ https://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/) is how both private and commercial (including ATP) pilots can anonymously and non-punitively share safety or otherwise concerning events. The goal is data collection to assess and prevent incidents. NASA's intake on the reports are not anonymous, but their public reports are. NASA functions as the filter between pilots and the FAA/NTSB.
- PeterStuer 4y ago
  Because the airline industry isn't too keen on pilots reporting safety issues. Fear of retaliation would stifle reporting if anonymity could not be ensured. This has nothing to do with 5G.
  - crote 4y ago
    The airline industry is very keen on pilots reporting safety incidents. Over the years it has moved more and more towards being a no-blame environment: as long as an incident is immediately reported and wasn't due to gross negligence, you will not be punished. If pilots are not afraid to report incidents, they will report them more often. This in turn means that hidden issues are more easily discovered, which in turn could save lives.
dontlaugh 4y ago
Worth noting that, just like the meteorological disruption, this is a US-only problem. It's not a problem with 5G in general, other countries assigned safe bands instead.
- jeromegv 4y ago
  Canada had to create buffer zone so that 5G towers are not anywhere near airports.
- crote 4y ago
  In The Netherlands 5g rollout is being delayed over and over again due to a single satellite communication station, used for NATO signal interception and a ship-to-shore communication downlink.
permo-w 4y ago
one thing I've noticed since 5g has been introduced in the UK is that 4g has gotten significantly slower and less prevalent. has anyone else noticed this?
- blue_cookeh 4y ago
  Not at all - in fact what I have noticed is that 4G seems to be far more reliable than 5G (on a Galaxy Fold 3 here) even in strong signal areas.
- Zigurd 4y ago
  In the US, carriers are allowed to brand an enhanced LTE service as "5Ge." That may account for there being fewer times when your phone shows "LTE" or "4G" as the connection type.
- _djo_ 4y ago
  That's not unexpected after a while, as the telco switches prioritisation and bandwidth from 4G cells to 5G cells, as happened with 3G to 4G. But it's too early for it to be happening at a noticeable level and might mean your provider has underinvested in capacity. Just a guess though.
- dfox 4y ago
  Many phones (certainly iPhone 12 behaves this way) will show 4G LTE link as being "5G" when they are connected to eNodeB that is capable of 5G in NSA mode regardles of whether the link actually uses any 5G NR bearer channels or whether it is actually physically possible (interference, path loss, gNodeB antenna configuration...) to use NR channels. Thus you can pretty well observe a lot of what really is 4G as 5G.
musha68k 4y ago
I’m not sure why so many things have gotten both fantastically more advanced and much worse at the same time. Reminds me of the “premium mediocre” conundrum a bit. In this case we can see it’s not the usual suspect (over/efficiency mindset) but maybe there is something much uglier lurking underneath? Affecting both companies and government bodies even - which should feel less “budget” pressure to be overly efficient in everything? I don’t know what factors those are. Though they could still be that plus something else (more transparently cultural)?
- britch 4y ago
  I don't think it's more complicated than money in either case. Businesses are increasing consolidated and have market pressure to show not just profits but increasing profits year over year. Government agencies are affected by a combination of regulatory capture and a half century of austerity
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    > I don't think it's more complicated than money in either case. The trick is to make it look more complicated than that, so no one follows the money. If somebody does, call them names. If calling them a Luddite conspiracy theorist doesn't work because you used to employ them as an expert and they have a long track record, just say that they're bolstering or emboldening or platforming Luddite conspiracy theorists (who might also be racist-adjacent China-deniers.) You buy a media in order to use it.
Katie69 4y ago
[dead]
alfiedotwtf 4y ago
Could this also be why my dad's satellite TV reception with a C-Band LNB has been degrading over time (as his area slowly gets 5G coverage)?
- blue_cookeh 4y ago
  LNBs can degrade over time - he may just need to replace it.
  - alfiedotwtf 4y ago
    hmm... I actually didn't think of that, ok will check.
- upofadown 4y ago
  Yes, very definitely. The new 4 GHz 5G transmitters are now adjacent to the existing downlink band and are causing interference to those users as well. Your dad might have to get an LNB with specific filtering or a separate filter and that might not work if the transmitter is close enough. Hobby dish owners have no protection here. They can't exclude 5G transmitters from their vicinity like a commercial dish operator. Relevant discussion: * https://www.intelsat.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/intelsat-C-band-whitepaper.pdf https://www.intelsat.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/intelsat...
  - alfiedotwtf 4y ago
    Damn, ok thanks for the info!
the_mitsuhiko 4y ago
I wonder if Europe just lucked out there or if someone there actually had that in mind when setting the spectrum.
- kranke155 4y ago
  The European Union is surprisingly technocratic, which is why a lot of complaints from Americans about EU regulation seem archaic to us. (Ie the debate that always pops here in HN about the EU restricting innovation by forcing chargers - this all sounds silly to Europeans because we’ve never seen them make a bad decision and stick to it for decades after it’s outdated US style).
  - JasonFruit 4y ago
    I'm not able to parse the bit about "the EU restricting innovation by forcing chargers". What kind of chargers are we talking about?
    - danhor 4y ago
      The EU requires a USB-C PD compatible charging port for smartphones and other small devices starting in 2024(?). This is primarily directed at lightning.
blantonl 4y ago
It is important to note that 5G and aircraft radar altimeters do NOT operate or coexist on the same frequencies. The problem is that 5G frequencies are close to radar altimeter c-band frequencies and the issue lies with certain aircraft that do not have sufficient band pass filters in place on their radar altimeter receivers, so when a strong 5G signal is present the aircraft's radar altimeter can be overloaded with adjacent channel interference. Retrofitting band pass filters on existing aircraft radar altimeters isn't a trivial task - avionics changes to aircraft are a multi-year project since extensive testing is done on anything electrical installed on an aicraft. Additionally, some 5G infrastructure equipment may need additional band pass filters installed to prevent spurious transmissions outside of their assigned frequency ranges in areas near airports. If you aren't familiar with a bandpass filter, it basically filters all RF outside of a certain frequency range. Sensitive receivers can naturally be overwhelmed by RF outside of the receiver's frequency range, and preventing that RF getting to the receiver in the first place is the role of a band pass filter.
stevenhubertron 4y ago
Has 5g brought anything positive to this world? So much hype but all it seems to have done is make flying more unsafe, create more ugly towers in cities and discharge my phone faster. Seems like boondoggle territory to me.
- jollyllama 4y ago
  Don't forget, it's impacted weather forecasting too.
  - zackmorris 4y ago
    Came here to say the same thing: https://www.salon.com/2022/03/14/how-5g-could-send-weather-forecasting-back-to-the-1970s_partner/ https://www.salon.com/2022/03/14/how-5g-could-send-weather-f... The central issue here is greed. The bands used for science (like 23.8 GHz) are critical, but not enough concern was given to them, so neighboring bands were auctioned off without proper consideration of consequences from interference, due to lobbying pressure from telecommunications companies. From the article: While the FCC's 2019 auction of the 24 GHz spectrum band generated $2 billion in revenue for the Department of the Treasury, the costs from severe weather could be much greater. This is the type of unintended consequence that comes with privatization of government services. What looks like a cost savings in the short term ends up being a cost increase in the long term. See also: the commons, natural monopoly.
- uncomputation 4y ago
  Faster data rates, lower network congestion, more efficient spectrum allocation, and private commercial networks for IoT. There are many benefits. Although, perhaps marketing has oversold those benefits that will be passed into consumers. Largely, 5G will benefit network operators, carriers, and industry. 5G has not appreciably made “flying more unsafe.” If anything, this is a good push to start updating altimeters to spec (installing bandpass filters, better testing) which actually will make flying more safe because currently these altimeters are susceptible to out of band frequencies.
  - deleted 4y ago
callesgg 4y ago
My main takeaway from the article is that it is scary that aircraft safety is so dependent on a signal that is so easily generated and spoofed. From the article it sounds like anyone can go to an airport and simply send some garbage signals towards an approaching aircraft to make it deploy air breaks and crash if the pilot is not quick to react. When I think about it it seams like a common thing in aviation tech. ads-b has similar issues, it is completely unauthenticicated/unsigned there is 100% trust. Anyone can pretend to be anyone else.

103 points by samizdis 4y ago

msh 4y ago

I find the airplane operators/pilot overentiteled. Why shut down 5G as some of them suggest if its the altimeters on the planes that are actually defective/not within spec.

twawaaay 4y ago
Ignoring reality isn't helpful. If we go this way we would have to defund highway patrols because it is waste of time (traffic rules already specify how to drive safely). You don't need IRS (because law says how to pay taxes). Also try to understand those pilots did not manufacture the equipment they are flying. They bought equipment that was certified to be airworthy or are flying for somebody who owns the equipment that was certified to be airworthy.
- KennyBlanken 4y ago
- Huh1337 4y ago
  So the solution here is to go after the planes/AOC holders that have misbehaving receivers and to force them to upgrade to correctly working hardware, just like we do with cars. Even if your car is certified, it will still get pulled off the street if it misbehaves - see Dieselgate. And company drivers also don't buy the cars they drive - nobody cares.
- stefan_ 4y ago
  We are in this situation because the FAA is ignoring reality for some 50 years now. They think just doing nothing means nothing bad can ever happen; well, reality just caught up with them.
xani_ 4y ago
The airplane pilots can't do shit about it, it's up to their parent company to pressure company (and pay $$$) that sold them planes to fix it. From their perspective it worked for decades and now someone decide to jam it. From engineering perspective, yes, they are defective and don't have enough filtering on the input to stay within its band
- p_l 4y ago
  From engineering perspective, the 5G equipment is not staying in its band, not radar altimeters. Remember that the regs for band usage are on transmit, not receive, and the physical reality makes radio altimeters especially hard to filter.
  - sidewndr46 4y ago
    I don't think you understand FCC rules about communications at all. You can't just freely snoop on someone's cell phone call because you are just receiving. There are all kinds of regulations around reception.
    - p_l 4y ago
      And I think you do not get the rules about frequency allocation, which don't care about separate rules related to snooping communications.
  - readams 4y ago
    No the altimeters are sensitive to frequencies outside their band. So 5g transmitting inside its band causes the altimeter to malfunction.
    - teeray 4y ago
      Many receivers can be affected by strong signals outside of their band. The strange analog world has effects like desensitization and intermodulation, which can produce in-band signals or attenuate the ones you intended to hear. The degree to which a receiver is immune to these effects is part of the engineering of the receiver. They likely didn’t consider strong C-band transmissions with a high duty cycle in their design at the time.
avidphantasm 4y ago
I want the pilots who have my life and the lives of my friends and loves ones in their hands to be entitled to whatever they need to safely do their jobs.
- msh 4y ago
  Well their companies bought defective equipment, and now wants someone else to pay but not using a resource that the airplane companies are using for free. I see 3 solutions: 1: shut down 5G. 2: Ground airplanes with defective equipment 3: Make the airplane companies pay for the spectrum that their defective equipment needs to operate. Option 2 would satisfy flying safely and not put externalities on companies that had no fault in this. 3 also would but would not be very efficient.
  - mellavora 4y ago
    > Well their companies bought defective equipment No they didn't. The equipment worked just fine until people started broadcasting on a nearby frequency. Like if I put a jammer outside your living room window and your WiFi stopped working, would that be because you bought 'defective equipment'? After all, your router doesn't have the latest 'anti-jamming' error correcting codes built in.
    - msh 4y ago
      Unless I misunderstand the altimeters did not live up to the required specifications when they were produced, but as the nearby spectrum was not in use nobody really cared about this.
    - darksaints 4y ago
      It wasn't the equipment working fine that made it defective. It was the fact that they were using frequencies hundreds of MHz away from what they were allowed to use.
    - blantonl 4y ago
      The equipment is indeed defective. If your receiver is able to be overloaded by adjacent channel interference because you as the designed neglected to install a bandpass filter on such a critical piece of equipment, and it wasn't discovered until later when someone legally was granted a license to use adjacent spectrum, your equipment is WILDLY defective. Just because it took many many years to identify the failure doesn't give the manufacturers a pass. A jammer is a malicious, unlicensed product specifically designed to prevent your Wifi from working.
upofadown 4y ago
>if its the altimeters on the planes that are actually defective/not within spec. Is there any evidence this is the case? This sort of thing is a lot like property zoning. If a steel mill starts up next door to your residential property in what used to be a park then there is nothing stopping you from adding more sound proofing to your walls to make it so you can sleep. But should you have to do this and can you do this at all? In this case the neighbouring band was originally used for satellite downlinks. So barely detectable signals with large dishes required. Radar altimeters in aircraft actually used to cause interference to the satellite downlinks when the aircraft flew over. The fact is that you need to have sufficient physical separation between services in adjacent bands. In this case, you can't expect things to work if an aircraft flies directly over a 4 GHz 5G transmitter at a low altitude. This aspect of adjacent band interference is an important part of spectrum management. You can't just wave the issue away...
- crote 4y ago
  Altimeters are allowed to use the 4.2GHz - 4.4GHz band. They are getting interference from signals at 3.98GHz and below. This means they need over twice the spectrum that was allocated to them. It's more like the family who is first to move into a neighborhood under construction, complaining that their kids can no longer play in the empty lots because houses are being built there. And it's not even the empty lot next to them, but one lot over.
  - chmorgan 4y ago
    This! The altimeters with issues are not operating to their design specs. No one noticed until 5g apparently but imo it’s on the altimeters, and not 5g, if they aren’t properly rejecting out of band noise/energy.
    - ominous_prime 4y ago
      Unfortunately these altimeters are part of a very large critical infrastructure, which can't be ignored. Just saying they shouldn't be working that way doesn't negate the fact that they are working that way. Part of engineering is taking the real world into account, even if the real world is inconvenient for you.
ominous_prime 4y ago
The planes were in spec at their time of production, and in working condition before the 5g rollout. Imagine carriers installing some new technology near highways which causes cars with a device installed before 1999 to occasionally crash. You can't just say "too bad, those owners should have upgraded by now". Regardless of what the specifications say, you can't rollout new technology without taking the real world parameters into account, and these were well-known parameters before anything rolled out.
mihaaly 4y ago
Probably because less harm is done if you have lower speed for browsing than when a plane crashes or the air traffic is decimated. But I am just guessing.
awinder 4y ago
If I inject a new feature into production and it destabilizes existing functionality, it’s the new features fault (and it gets rolled back). It doesn’t matter if I really think it’s the fault of the other component, or I would have designed it differently (especially now that I know the consequences!). Maybe we end up “fixing” the existing functionality and then proceeding with the new feature — but not until stable state is re-established. This is like standard practice for shit that is of trivial importance to humanity in a newish engineering field. So I don’t for the life of me understand the logic of being more flippant when it comes to human lives in a more established engineering field.

tomohawk 4y ago

> “I’d sleep like a baby [on a plane] that flew over a 5G base station at full power output,” he told Spectrum. “Probably something happens that’s unusual and the pilots attribute it to 5G but maybe it’s not attributable to 5G. After everything in the news, they’re now submitting what they actually see, whereas before they perhaps weren't motivated to do that.” This is just pure speculation.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

underscores__ 4y ago

_s 4y ago

I think there is some context missing from this; The 5G band that was auctioned off is only one step next to the band used by radar altimeters - essentially a piece of equipment on aircraft that gives it its precise height above the ground. Aircraft can and do have barometric (pressure corrected) and GPS altimeters as well (which are usually giving you your height above sea level - and knowing the height of the terrain you can work out your height above ground), all of which feed into the various systems allowing them to have an accurate height at any given point during the flight. This is most needed when flying “precision 3D approaches”, usually in bad weather when visual contact with the ground may not be possible until the wheels actually touch the ground. Autopilot systems that land the aircraft fly these “approaches”, and thus rely greatly on their height, speed and distance. These radar altimeters were mostly designed and certified back in the 80’s (or even earlier!) - and it’s a lot of work to have any equipment certified - especially today. Hardware + software back then was nowhere near as good as it is today, yet many of these altimeters still being produced today would be to the original spec from a few decades ago - which had a much wider tolerance or sensitivity to the frequencies, so when you have a frequency only a few steps away - a slightly older / worn equipment with perhaps not the best shielding will definitely pick up some surges from frequencies next to it. Blame the FAA for their archaic and slow, near impossible process to get equipment certified. Blame the Aircraft / Equipment manufacturers for not updating their equipment with the times, but that’s on the FAA for making this process difficult- see 737 certification as an example, leading to the max accidents. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G#Aviation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G#Aviation

Someone1234 4y ago
> FAA for making this process difficult- see 737 certification as an example, leading to the max accidents. The certification process being "difficult" isn't why the 737 Max was unsafe. The FAA allowed Boeing to self-certify its safety, and voices inside the company were ignored or silence. They literally created a system to save a buck for their clients then outsourced development of that system to save another buck, then rubber-stamped it themselves. Blaming this on too much or too difficult regulation is farcical. PS - I also find the entire thrust of this argument contradictory: "Equipment built in the 80s wasn't high enough quality for the new 5G operating environment, so we need to weaken 'difficult' regulation today to make producing lower quality equipment cheaper, tomorrow be damned."

ethbr0 4y ago

The rollout of this was disgusting. The FCC only cared about selling the spectrum. The FAA only cared about minimizing the chance of any accidents. Neither was able to look at the science, come to a compromise, and then implement it in a joint way. It took the carriers, who had just paid $80b (from the article) to inject sanity into the approach via voluntary buffer zones. Turns out, single purpose regulatory agencies aren't great at considering matters outside their area of focus...

avidphantasm 4y ago
It seems like this is a case of multi-agency regulatory capture (by industries with competing interests) resulting in behavior akin to a failed state. If the state can’t arbitrate conflicts over public goods, what good is it?
- throwoutway 4y ago
  > If the state can’t arbitrate conflicts over public goods, what good is it? It could. Did anyone bring it to a court?
  - thatguy0900 4y ago
    Is the only way for the fcc and faa to come to a joint conclusion for someone to spend millions in court forcing them to?
    - dylan604 4y ago
      would it be really surprising if that was the case though?
    - throwoutway 4y ago
      Did I say that? Or am I responding to a extremely bizarre comment about the US being a “failed state” when parties found a solution without even exhausting the most obvious answer (given the US is a lawsuit-happy nation)
4y ago

can16358p 4y ago

So regardless of 5G C Band is indeed the cause or not, why aren't they testing it in a controlled environment? Make some test flights in good viewing conditions near those locations with the reports, and have turned on, data downloading/uploading 5G cell phones onboard using different planes/series and see if there's any interference happening. I know it's more complicated and costlier than that but since lives might potentially be in danger and since it's too late to change the 5G bands, it seems to be the only viable option. If it it indeed causes, C band can simply be banned near runways and say, be allowed inside the airport in low power settings if it doesn't cause interference with outside planes.

karteum 4y ago
The issue has been known and adressed in France for a while (and to my knowledge, France has been pioneer in handling the topic seriously. e.g. see https://www.anfr.fr/liste-actualites/actualite/la-protection-des-radioaltimetres-vis-a-vis-de-la-5g-les-nouveaux-developpements-dans-le-monde https://www.anfr.fr/liste-actualites/actualite/la-protection... ). 5G base stations have compliant out-of-band emissions so the issue is not "because of 5G" but rather "because radio-altimeters gather energy from adjacent bands" (something we call "blocking"). Not all radio-altimeters are the same, but for some of them there is very little filtering and the only thing that protected them from good old 4G was that the antenna behaves somewhat as a filter and 2.6 GHz was far enough from 4.2 GHz... It may sound silly for a safety-critical equipment, but we really have to think about the really long lifetime of those equipments and think with the context of the time when they were designed/deployed (e.g. if there is only space-to-earth transmission in adjacent bands, why would they put filters that would add insertion loss and cost ? In the 80's there was no 4G/5G in sight...). Probably the aeronautical authorities also failed to inform the relevant issue in due time within the spectrum regulation process, so this has not been known or studied properly at ITU/CEPT/etc in the context of those frequency bands close to 4.2 GHz. It also seems that the radio-altimeters vendors keep a lot of secrecy on the technical details of their equipments (a part of the internal culture which also comes from the dual civil/military use of those systems) so even people who represent civil aviation authorities or aircraft manufacturers such as boeing/airbus in spectrum regulation authorities do not always have full access to the relevant information. Now the situation is what it is, and the short-term solution is to have some kind of 5G exclusion zones around airports, and of course operators are not happy with this because they paid huge prices for 5G licences and now they discover that they have new/additional constraints around airports... Long-term solution is also an issue, because it is not that simple to put filters on existing equipments (if they change the behavior, the whole computer need to be re-calibrated, and pilots trained, and the whole thing re-certified, which is also not as simple of doing it once and certifying all aircrafts from the same model but really must be done one-by-one in a custom way for every aircraft). I understood that new specs for radio-altimeters will soon be out so we can hope that the situation improves soon as the retrofit will be able to start (even though it will take years), but there is a possibility that even new radio-altimeters may still continue to be vulnerable to blocking in 4-4.2 GHz in order to maintain their required accuracy (I'm no expert in radars but I trust those people who told me). So the issue will be solved with regards to 5G in 3.4-3.8 GHz as deployed in Europe, but maybe not above 4 GHz (which is one reason why it may be better to restrict to low-power/verticals in the future uses in those bands). Anyway, this is a complex topic as you see...

YetAnotherNick 4y ago

> anonymously share safety incidents and concerns Why? It is not like there is serious privacy violation in telling that altimeter broke, and this makes the data much less reliable. Not saying the data is fake for sure, but I have came across enough haters of 5g, and I am pretty sure someone could post fake entries just to scare people.

jwn 4y ago
ASRS (https://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/ https://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/) is how both private and commercial (including ATP) pilots can anonymously and non-punitively share safety or otherwise concerning events. The goal is data collection to assess and prevent incidents. NASA's intake on the reports are not anonymous, but their public reports are. NASA functions as the filter between pilots and the FAA/NTSB.
PeterStuer 4y ago
Because the airline industry isn't too keen on pilots reporting safety issues. Fear of retaliation would stifle reporting if anonymity could not be ensured. This has nothing to do with 5G.
- crote 4y ago
  The airline industry is very keen on pilots reporting safety incidents. Over the years it has moved more and more towards being a no-blame environment: as long as an incident is immediately reported and wasn't due to gross negligence, you will not be punished. If pilots are not afraid to report incidents, they will report them more often. This in turn means that hidden issues are more easily discovered, which in turn could save lives.

dontlaugh 4y ago

Worth noting that, just like the meteorological disruption, this is a US-only problem. It's not a problem with 5G in general, other countries assigned safe bands instead.

jeromegv 4y ago
Canada had to create buffer zone so that 5G towers are not anywhere near airports.
crote 4y ago
In The Netherlands 5g rollout is being delayed over and over again due to a single satellite communication station, used for NATO signal interception and a ship-to-shore communication downlink.

permo-w 4y ago

one thing I've noticed since 5g has been introduced in the UK is that 4g has gotten significantly slower and less prevalent. has anyone else noticed this?

blue_cookeh 4y ago
Not at all - in fact what I have noticed is that 4G seems to be far more reliable than 5G (on a Galaxy Fold 3 here) even in strong signal areas.
Zigurd 4y ago
In the US, carriers are allowed to brand an enhanced LTE service as "5Ge." That may account for there being fewer times when your phone shows "LTE" or "4G" as the connection type.
_djo_ 4y ago
That's not unexpected after a while, as the telco switches prioritisation and bandwidth from 4G cells to 5G cells, as happened with 3G to 4G. But it's too early for it to be happening at a noticeable level and might mean your provider has underinvested in capacity. Just a guess though.
dfox 4y ago
Many phones (certainly iPhone 12 behaves this way) will show 4G LTE link as being "5G" when they are connected to eNodeB that is capable of 5G in NSA mode regardles of whether the link actually uses any 5G NR bearer channels or whether it is actually physically possible (interference, path loss, gNodeB antenna configuration...) to use NR channels. Thus you can pretty well observe a lot of what really is 4G as 5G.

musha68k 4y ago

I’m not sure why so many things have gotten both fantastically more advanced and much worse at the same time. Reminds me of the “premium mediocre” conundrum a bit. In this case we can see it’s not the usual suspect (over/efficiency mindset) but maybe there is something much uglier lurking underneath? Affecting both companies and government bodies even - which should feel less “budget” pressure to be overly efficient in everything? I don’t know what factors those are. Though they could still be that plus something else (more transparently cultural)?

britch 4y ago
I don't think it's more complicated than money in either case. Businesses are increasing consolidated and have market pressure to show not just profits but increasing profits year over year. Government agencies are affected by a combination of regulatory capture and a half century of austerity
- pessimizer 4y ago
  > I don't think it's more complicated than money in either case. The trick is to make it look more complicated than that, so no one follows the money. If somebody does, call them names. If calling them a Luddite conspiracy theorist doesn't work because you used to employ them as an expert and they have a long track record, just say that they're bolstering or emboldening or platforming Luddite conspiracy theorists (who might also be racist-adjacent China-deniers.) You buy a media in order to use it.

Katie69 4y ago

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alfiedotwtf 4y ago

Could this also be why my dad's satellite TV reception with a C-Band LNB has been degrading over time (as his area slowly gets 5G coverage)?

blue_cookeh 4y ago
LNBs can degrade over time - he may just need to replace it.
- alfiedotwtf 4y ago
  hmm... I actually didn't think of that, ok will check.
upofadown 4y ago
Yes, very definitely. The new 4 GHz 5G transmitters are now adjacent to the existing downlink band and are causing interference to those users as well. Your dad might have to get an LNB with specific filtering or a separate filter and that might not work if the transmitter is close enough. Hobby dish owners have no protection here. They can't exclude 5G transmitters from their vicinity like a commercial dish operator. Relevant discussion: * https://www.intelsat.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/intelsat-C-band-whitepaper.pdf https://www.intelsat.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/intelsat...
- alfiedotwtf 4y ago
  Damn, ok thanks for the info!

the_mitsuhiko 4y ago

I wonder if Europe just lucked out there or if someone there actually had that in mind when setting the spectrum.

kranke155 4y ago
The European Union is surprisingly technocratic, which is why a lot of complaints from Americans about EU regulation seem archaic to us. (Ie the debate that always pops here in HN about the EU restricting innovation by forcing chargers - this all sounds silly to Europeans because we’ve never seen them make a bad decision and stick to it for decades after it’s outdated US style).
- JasonFruit 4y ago
  I'm not able to parse the bit about "the EU restricting innovation by forcing chargers". What kind of chargers are we talking about?
  - danhor 4y ago
    The EU requires a USB-C PD compatible charging port for smartphones and other small devices starting in 2024(?). This is primarily directed at lightning.

blantonl 4y ago

It is important to note that 5G and aircraft radar altimeters do NOT operate or coexist on the same frequencies. The problem is that 5G frequencies are close to radar altimeter c-band frequencies and the issue lies with certain aircraft that do not have sufficient band pass filters in place on their radar altimeter receivers, so when a strong 5G signal is present the aircraft's radar altimeter can be overloaded with adjacent channel interference. Retrofitting band pass filters on existing aircraft radar altimeters isn't a trivial task - avionics changes to aircraft are a multi-year project since extensive testing is done on anything electrical installed on an aicraft. Additionally, some 5G infrastructure equipment may need additional band pass filters installed to prevent spurious transmissions outside of their assigned frequency ranges in areas near airports. If you aren't familiar with a bandpass filter, it basically filters all RF outside of a certain frequency range. Sensitive receivers can naturally be overwhelmed by RF outside of the receiver's frequency range, and preventing that RF getting to the receiver in the first place is the role of a band pass filter.

stevenhubertron 4y ago

Has 5g brought anything positive to this world? So much hype but all it seems to have done is make flying more unsafe, create more ugly towers in cities and discharge my phone faster. Seems like boondoggle territory to me.

jollyllama 4y ago
Don't forget, it's impacted weather forecasting too.
- zackmorris 4y ago
  Came here to say the same thing: https://www.salon.com/2022/03/14/how-5g-could-send-weather-forecasting-back-to-the-1970s_partner/ https://www.salon.com/2022/03/14/how-5g-could-send-weather-f... The central issue here is greed. The bands used for science (like 23.8 GHz) are critical, but not enough concern was given to them, so neighboring bands were auctioned off without proper consideration of consequences from interference, due to lobbying pressure from telecommunications companies. From the article: While the FCC's 2019 auction of the 24 GHz spectrum band generated $2 billion in revenue for the Department of the Treasury, the costs from severe weather could be much greater. This is the type of unintended consequence that comes with privatization of government services. What looks like a cost savings in the short term ends up being a cost increase in the long term. See also: the commons, natural monopoly.
uncomputation 4y ago
Faster data rates, lower network congestion, more efficient spectrum allocation, and private commercial networks for IoT. There are many benefits. Although, perhaps marketing has oversold those benefits that will be passed into consumers. Largely, 5G will benefit network operators, carriers, and industry. 5G has not appreciably made “flying more unsafe.” If anything, this is a good push to start updating altimeters to spec (installing bandpass filters, better testing) which actually will make flying more safe because currently these altimeters are susceptible to out of band frequencies.
- deleted 4y ago

callesgg 4y ago

My main takeaway from the article is that it is scary that aircraft safety is so dependent on a signal that is so easily generated and spoofed. From the article it sounds like anyone can go to an airport and simply send some garbage signals towards an approaching aircraft to make it deploy air breaks and crash if the pilot is not quick to react. When I think about it it seams like a common thing in aviation tech. ads-b has similar issues, it is completely unauthenticicated/unsigned there is 100% trust. Anyone can pretend to be anyone else.