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Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, and FCC Bullying

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Re: Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, and FCC Bullying

#51

Post by JumpCrisscross »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #26

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…

> I'm quite concerned about NASA's warning that 5G will weaken our ability to forecast the weather

NASA issued no such warning.

5G would interfere with one satellite-based moisture measure around populated areas. NOAA’s commentary was around how that one measure would need to be statistically tweaked or supplemented. (The headlines resulted from NOAA’s head warning the Congress that if the latter didn’t give him funding for these tweaks, our forecasts would become dramatically worse.)

Hurricanes, moreover, build over oceans. AT&T can’t keep a call in my Manhattan apartment; it’s going to be a while before 5G signals are making it to the middle of the Atlantic.

Re: Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, and FCC Bullying

#52

Post by np_tedious »

_bxg1 wrote: post #33

There's such weird marketing zealotry behind 5G. They're acting like it's going to completely reshape society, but at best it's just... faster internet. In places where the internet is already pretty fast. 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.)

You can hear some particularly wild assertions like this in the long running commercial throughout the past few episodes of Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History podcast. They are formatted as conversation between Gladwell and an AT&T exec.

It always starts with "what are some things that might be enabled if bandwidth improved and latency decreased" and then just jumps immediately to some Internet of Things utopia.

Re: Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, and FCC Bullying

#53

Post by Causality1 »

_bxg1 wrote: post #33

There's such weird marketing zealotry behind 5G. They're acting like it's going to completely reshape society, but at best it's just... faster internet. In places where the internet is already pretty fast. 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.)

Indeed. What's the point in being able to use up the 22GB data cap on my "unlimited" plan in five minutes instead of seventy minutes?

Re: Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, and FCC Bullying

#54

Post by sipjca »

stefan_ wrote: post #32
amluto wrote: post #7

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…

No one is even putting millimeter-wave transmitters in phones right now. 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.

Um... Yes they are. The Galaxy S10 5G has a mmW radio in it that’s transmits mmW waves for the uplink. The 5G spec also requires certain protection when the UE (phone) Tx wave might go through tissue. But you’re correct that it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to attempt to Tx/Rx on a beam pointed at your head since it will lead to drastically lower SNR

Re: Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, and FCC Bullying

#55

Post by wbl »

patient_zero wrote: post #9

The most important information in this piece is the FCC making rules favoring the very telecoms they are supposed to be regulating. Not that anyone familiar with this administration (or that scumbag Pai) is surprised.

No the FCC made rules favoring the public's access to telecom services over NIMBYs. This has happened years ago for ham service.

Re: Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, and FCC Bullying

#56

Post by ma2rten »

_bxg1 wrote: post #33

There's such weird marketing zealotry behind 5G. They're acting like it's going to completely reshape society, but at best it's just... faster internet. In places where the internet is already pretty fast. 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.)

This is remind me of when Trump gave a statement about 5G. He said something like "Right now we have 5G, which is great. Soon we will have 6G which will be even better."

Re: Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, and FCC Bullying

#57

Post by asciident »

_bxg1 wrote: post #33

There's such weird marketing zealotry behind 5G. They're acting like it's going to completely reshape society, but at best it's just... faster internet. In places where the internet is already pretty fast. 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.)

Everything I've heard about it indicates that it's a trash technology. Unless you're standing next to an emitter, it's no faster than 4G and potentially even slower. Like you walk one block or behind a wall and it's not good anymore. So you gotta put one of these up on every block. I'm banking on it being a complete dud, like 3D televisions.

Re: Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, and FCC Bullying

#58

Post by JumpCrisscross »

_bxg1 wrote: post #33

There's such weird marketing zealotry behind 5G. They're acting like it's going to completely reshape society, but at best it's just... faster internet. In places where the internet is already pretty fast. 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.)

> at best it's just... faster internet

Counterpoint: streaming audio and video were singularly enabled by faster internet. That is restructuring multibillion-dollar industries. The iPhone, one could argue, and through it real-time social media, are products of mobile internet.

There are legitimate new capabilities that will likely erupt from cheaper, faster mobile internet. If the playground is in Shenzhen versus Silicon Valley, that’s where resources should be allocated to explore that potential.

I’m not arguing for 5G. (I don’t know enough about it.) But “it’s just faster internet” is a facile counterargument.

Re: Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, and FCC Bullying

#59

Post by toast0 »

Johnny555 wrote: post #22
merpnderp wrote: post #6

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)

Ignoring the problematic new spectrum...

If 5g is reasonable to run on existing spectrum (I think this is generally true, but I don't know if mobile devices are configured for it), and it allows for more concurrent use (this is the promise, yes?), and if there are sufficient deployed devices to make it useful, refarming the spectrum to 5g would be useful for improving user experience in the situation described. Most carriers already went through this with 3g and LTE.

You could invest in more 4g infrastructure in theory, that usually means adding more towers to shrink the cell size in congested areas; it's often the case that tower density is limited by municipal agencies rather than carrier budgets.

Re: Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to 5G, Citing Health, Aesthetics, and FCC Bullying

#60

Post by posixplz »

merpnderp wrote: post #6
jchw wrote: post #2

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.

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.

5G has nothing to do with the problem you’ve described — a symptom of insufficient tower backhaul. It’s typical for 4G LTE operators to deploy a minuscule 100Mbit fiber connection per tower. We should be investing in 1Gbit backhaul of LTE.A, but that’s not a sexy message for consumer TV ads.

The farce of 5G is that it’s a pure marketing ploy. It’s not driven by technical need.

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