It is of course a concern that should be looked at, but we're currently in the "fear monger" stage with 5G. Those people who do the studies are the good people, but the people who take it and misrepresent it leverage fear of change/the new.
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/high-exposure-...
https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/416515-theres-a-clear...
The average exposure is many magnitudes lower. And given that heating is the only scientifically possible outcome, it is a pretty well studied area, but we should surely keep doing more.
Besides the 'boy who cried wolf' nature of radio causing cancer, I'd also like to know the power consumption for the extreme density required to relay gigabit+ connections across town, I think I heard the range between towers is something like 500 ft? There are, ostensibly, not lower power devices to be processing all these connections.
> “The exposures used in the studies cannot be compared directly to the exposure that humans experience when using a cell phone,” said John Bucher, Ph.D., NTP senior scientist. “In our studies, rats and mice received radio frequency radiation across their whole bodies. By contrast, people are mostly exposed in specific local tissues close to where they hold the phone. In addition, the exposure levels and durations in our studies were greater than what people experience.”
> The lowest exposure level used in the studies was equal to the maximum local tissue exposure currently allowed for cell phone users. This power level rarely occurs with typical cell phone use. The highest exposure level in the studies was four times higher than the maximum power level permitted.
Yeah, they really cooked those critters. Takeaway: if you work on 200W transmitters, don't sit on them all day every day.
Meanwhile, I'd like to keep using the 1W ~0% duty cycle transmitter in my phone, thankyouverymuch.
Does this mean in trains or public building where multiple phones are present, even hundreds of phones? 4x seems rather a small margin for harm considering every human is potentially carrying a device and using it at the same time occurs multiple times during the day.
Along with the rest of their body.
Is it a just one of many conspiracy theories cooked by a Kremlin agency that happened to work in the public sphere? Is there a competing technology stack?
We should encourage research like this, despite the overreactions that might ensue. The idea that we fully understand the effects of our technology in aggregate is prideful and short-sighted.
Conspiracy theories are probably a lucrative industry if you get enough of a following.
See: far right/left, and other unusual controversial topics.
If not, I don't feel the need for faster speeds than what I get, but I would be very interested in getting more data per month at the same (or lower) monthly price. If a cellular provider could give me internet connectivity (LTE speeds) at a price of something like $1 per gigabyte I would drop my household's cable service in favor of that right away.
If there are species living around the globe that might not be able to continue their current role in the global ecosystem in a world where 5G is pervasive, then we should not allow the use of 5G in the vast majority of the world. The consequences, for humans, via trophic cascade or whatever, would be extremely uncertain. Are the benefits of 5G really compelling enough to brave them? Certainly they are not compelling enough to me.
Cities and buildings provide tremendous benefits. These benefits, presumably, outweigh the costs of harming wildlife to construct them.
The OP is arguing that the benefits of 5G are objectively minor and therefore not worth the cost of causing mass harm to a broad swath of wildlife.
I agree with the OP's position -- I will gladly keep my ~50Mbit 4G speeds if it means we will prevent the collapse of various insect populations.
A less sinister take might be that faster speeds allow each device to get off the air faster, enabling more devices to be used in the same area. But that’s mostly a technical solution and I highly doubt the advantages rise to the level that the Business side has started pushing it. Salespeople just see the commissions.
Not just marketing people. Everyone at companies making the equipment (Ericsson, Nokia, Huawei), the chipsets (Qualcomm), and rolling out the networks (e.g., AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint) wants a piece of the pie.
Having said that, the promise of 5G is that it brings such an enormous bandwidth from a frequency perspective that it literally could be a broadly distributed very high speed connection technology for fixed locations. Purportedly one of the reasons Google abandoned their fiber project was that ultra-high speed for huge numbers of users with 5G would make fixed infrastructure for the last mile redundant. We'll see.
Also, things load pretty slow right now.
4G is on the order of 10^9 Hz (1 GHz), and 5G is on the order of 10^10 - 10^11 Hz. Both are non-ionizing radiation, and in the overall scheme of things, relatively close in frequency.
Ionizing radiation causes cell mutation. It starts with UV radiation at 10^16 Hz. X-rays are around 10^18 Hz.
We can't say with certainty that 5G can't possibly have some negative effects, but so far, we have no reason to believe it.
We can't prove it's completely safe, but nobody yet has been able to demonstrate any compelling evidence that it's unsafe.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/insect_numbers_declining_why_...
That's the world's leading authority on human health saying that. I don't care that technically speaking cell phones "can't" cause cancer because they are thought to be non-ionizing.
That's just the same as all the other things in history that have been impossible until they've been done.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/world-health-organization-to-dr...
Could there be some other mechanism that we don't understand yet and haven't observed yet that could be harmful? Yes, of course. But nobody has been able to provide any evidence yet.
For this reason it's traditionally considers useless as radio transmission. And turned into a global free frequency span. Making this radio space used by all kinds of devices that you have at home. Wifi, Bluetooth, etc. There is tons of research of how radio and other waves effect the human body.
