31–40 of 433 posts
I find the argument that 5G is at all unsafe on a pole to be a bit silly. I think there are a couple of much more serious issues: 1. Is a millimeter-wave transmitter in a phone safe? The power output is moderately high, and these wavelengths are absorbed near the surface of your skin or your cornea . Cellphones are held near faces all the time. So I’d be much more concerned about using a 5G phone than about living ne…
But the more obvious point is that millimeter-wave 5G can only work with beamforming, and a beam that is going through your head where it is fully, entirely, fucking completely absorbed not a millimeter in, well, that's not going to yield a lot of throughput.
I can only assume it's a mixture of political and economic stakeholders that have their own reasons for really wanting it to succeed (looking competitive against China, selling new phones, etc.)
It's my impression that the vanguard of the anti-vaxxer movement have long since moved on to 5G as their battleground of choice. And to be fair, of all the places they could try to incite another mindless panic, this is probably the most harmless they could have chosen - at least this time around no children will die from it.
Of course I think maybe what we are seeing is the activist arm of what I've heard called "conspiritainment." It's a way for people to LARP as activists at no real inconvenience to themselves. They get to feel self righteous at no real cost.
It also feels a bit like the domestic version of what I've heard Africans call "white savior tourism" where people from the West go to Africa to fill their Instagram with how they are saving the world.
Picking a real issue usually means confronting and speaking truth to power. That often has real life consequences. Attacking windmills (even literally! that is a thing too!) does not.
Edit: I once heard an investigative journalist and PI make this joke: "How can you tell if a conspiracy theorist is right?" "Check for their name in a missing persons database."
One thing that a lot of people do not understand is that 5G can operate in any frequency band. In fact, for many 4G radios it is nothing more than a software upgrade, no change to the physical device or power levels, just faster and lower throughput.
The fact that the general public doesn't know this is a failure of the carriers and FCC. Instead of clearly stating what the differences are and maybe not putting everything in the 5G bucket they got greedy and thought they could get it all. If the high frequency set was left out of 5Gs first round no one would have objected to the upgrade. I find the "We need 5G so we can have real time translation and autonomous ca…
I’m ambivalent. Cellphone internet is already faster than cable internet for many people. Even if the 5g health risk is complete bunk, do we really need 5g? Usually when I want internet that fast I want it at home or work. As such, I am a bit more excited for Wifi 6.
One thing that a lot of people do not understand is that 5G can operate in any frequency band. In fact, for many 4G radios it is nothing more than a software upgrade, no change to the physical device or power levels, just faster and lower throughput.
_Lower_ throughput? Care to elaborate?
Saying 4G->5G for most modems is just a software upgrade for most modems is not quite accurate. The RF hardware itself is generally not a full SDR. There are predefined RF paths tuned for the bands in 4G/5G. So it’s a little more than a software upgrade. Theoretically this is possible but I think companies like Qualcomm are too worried about pushing their new hardware instead of software. I do think it should move in this direction and it would benefit companies like Qualcomm to do this by selling software updates.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
At 5pm after work I get around 0kbps because everyone is leaving work and uploading selfies, starting music, playing a video or whatever. 5G would vastly improved the congestion problem so I could at least message I’ll be late as I’m stopping for milk, or I’ll be late as I’ve been in a wreck and am about to be airlifted.
Are you sure 5G is the only answer, or could your telco invest in more 4G infrastructure? (which they are probably reluctant to do with 5G around the corner)
https://www.zdnet.com/article/5g-needed-to-ease-4g-lte-conge...
Nilay Patel wrote an editorial over at The Verge titled "Wait, why the hell is the ‘race to 5G’ even a race?": https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/23/18637213/5g-race-us-leade... > All I’m asking is that the next time you hear a wireless industry person talk about the “race” to 5G, stop and ask them why it’s a race. Ask who the competitors are, and what happens if we come in second place. See if you buy the answer. I sus…
nobody at the T-Mobile store knows anything
Its a fun thought exercise, but just smile and nod.
The whole point of going into a brick and mortar store is just to see how the improv troupe will lie to you this time.
I’m ambivalent. Cellphone internet is already faster than cable internet for many people. Even if the 5g health risk is complete bunk, do we really need 5g? Usually when I want internet that fast I want it at home or work. As such, I am a bit more excited for Wifi 6.
So then take that and remember that there is zero fundamental difference between LAN and WAN except latency based on distance and even that isn't that restrictive on Earth, particularly within a country. It's about 93 miles per millisecond RTT under ideal vacuum/air/photonic-bandgap fiber, or 70% of that in standard optical fiber, so 1/90 of a second say could easily be enough for a round trip to anything within a good 300-500 miles. And at a minimum, any application done on a LAN right now could apply directly. For a lot of the public for example thin-ish clients might actually make a great deal of sense for their "personal computer", just as it long has for businesses or certain home users right now, if only they had reliable high bandwidth connections. A lot of things that many people currently centralize could be decentralized again if it was ubiquitous that the population just WireGuard into their LAN from anywhere within a hundreds of miles or more and have an experience essentially the same as being on the LAN itself.
I mean yeah, we can imagine all sorts of future AR/VR applications or enhanced privacy via onion routing and the like (essentially being able to burn some spare bandwidth on it for the same experience as present) and the like too. But is it even necessary to imagine that far? We use LANs right now, and that for most people there is a dramatic split in their LAN/WAN experience isn't down to physics (most people aren't going more then 500-1000 miles away with great regularity).