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

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

#81

Post by EdwardDiego » Sat, Aug 24, 2019, 4:25 PM UTC

sschueller wrote: post #28

zw123456 wrote: post #5

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…

> If the high frequency set was left out of 5Gs first round no one would have objected to the upgrade.

There's a subset that will object to anything involving radio because it's electro-magnetic RADIATION and RADIATION causes cancer!

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

#82

Post by renaudg » Sat, Aug 24, 2019, 4:25 PM UTC

MrVitaliy wrote: post #74

This feels a lot like the battle of Blue-ray vs HD-dvd back in the early 2000s. While Blue-ray did win, it was less relevant to the industry than the original CD format. Things just moved online, flash storage and everyone got high-speed internet. If public WiFi becomes more ubiquitous, especially in densely populated areas, 4G vs 5G will be just as irrelevant as the battles for next CD format.

Handover on public WiFi is generally horrible, the tech is simply not designed for that kind of use. I spend half of the day with WiFi turned off on my iPhone because it catches weak nearby signals even when they're simply not strong enough to work. iOS has "WiFi assist" which is supposed to be smart about that and fall back to a cell connection, but that simply never works in my experience.

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

#83

Post by wikibob » Sat, Aug 24, 2019, 4:25 PM UTC

renaudg wrote: post #78

asciident wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe you'll be interested to hear from actual 5G users before making uninformed claims. I have home wireless broadband in central London (no other good broadband offering in my street) and was upgraded from 4G to 5G last week. I went from an average of 5-10Mbps at peak times and 20Mbps max on 4G, to 150-250Mbps peak time and 350MBps max on 5G, on the same carrier (Three). Enough said.

How did you manage to get upgraded?

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

#84

Post by hyperbovine » Sat, Aug 24, 2019, 4:25 PM UTC

renaudg wrote: post #78

asciident wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe you'll be interested to hear from actual 5G users before making uninformed claims. I have home wireless broadband in central London (no other good broadband offering in my street) and was upgraded from 4G to 5G last week. I went from an average of 5-10Mbps at peak times and 20Mbps max on 4G, to 150-250Mbps peak time and 350MBps max on 5G, on the same carrier (Three). Enough said.

Is it? I don’t really see how that contradicts what op was saying.

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

#85

Post by ptero » Sat, Aug 24, 2019, 4:27 PM UTC

renaudg wrote: post #78

asciident wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe you'll be interested to hear from actual 5G users before making uninformed claims. I have home wireless broadband in central London (no other good broadband offering in my street) and was upgraded from 4G to 5G last week. I went from an average of 5-10Mbps at peak times and 20Mbps max on 4G, to 150-250Mbps peak time and 350MBps max on 5G, on the same carrier (Three). Enough said.

But does it matter for you? I know it would not for me. I can certainly find counterexamples, but for me the last leg bandwidth is seldom the bottleneck. My 2c.

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

#86

Post by renaudg » Sat, Aug 24, 2019, 4:28 PM UTC

didibus wrote: post #75

Can someone with know how tell me if 5G is actually good tech? I feel like carriers just wanted to launch a new product called 5G, and just threw together some not that great tech behind it. Is 5G actually innovative? Are we talking order of magnitude improvements over 4G? Cause right now all I hear is that 5G achieves faster speeds and added throughput by simply putting more towers and access points around. That doe…

Yes. Just got upgraded to 5G (from 4G) for my wireless home broadband, went from 5-10Mbps average and 20Mbps peak to 200Mbps average and 380Mbps peak.

It's at least as big a jump as 3G to 4G was.

The hype is real.

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

#87

Post by PorterDuff » Sat, Aug 24, 2019, 4:28 PM UTC

Since I don't download uncompressed 4k video anymore, I'm personally getting practically all of the value of the internet (to me) from merely having a cheap cable connection at home. I've never been certain who 5g or fiber is really targeting. Amazon works fine, Netflix works fine, downloading an OS or language tool set isn't too heinous. High data speed to a phone is uninteresting, but YMMV. As usual, improvements become less useful on the margin.

The one use case I've run into might be robot cars, probably lower latency/higher bandwidth. I don't know enough about where the intelligence actually lives or how much in the way of inter-car communications is actually required though.

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

#88

Post by jhncls » Sat, Aug 24, 2019, 4:28 PM UTC

renaudg wrote: post #78

asciident wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe you'll be interested to hear from actual 5G users before making uninformed claims. I have home wireless broadband in central London (no other good broadband offering in my street) and was upgraded from 4G to 5G last week. I went from an average of 5-10Mbps at peak times and 20Mbps max on 4G, to 150-250Mbps peak time and 350MBps max on 5G, on the same carrier (Three). Enough said.

Maybe it just works fast because there still are only a very limited number of users? And will speeds and latencies drop as the airspace gets more saturated?

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

#89

Post by EdwardDiego » Sat, Aug 24, 2019, 4:28 PM UTC

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…

> these wavelengths are absorbed near the surface of your skin or your cornea

And they'd cause a... slight heating effect. That's about it. So yeah, if you held your voice transmitting phone directly to your face for several decades, you might create enough tissue damage to up the cancer risk.

But then the radio engineers I used to work with climbed radio towers with microwave emitters putting out far far far more energy than a cellphone, and their only rule was "don't stick your head or crotch in front of a microwave transmitter as you're climbing up".

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

#90

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Aug 24, 2019, 4:28 PM UTC

didibus wrote: post #75

Can someone with know how tell me if 5G is actually good tech? I feel like carriers just wanted to launch a new product called 5G, and just threw together some not that great tech behind it. Is 5G actually innovative? Are we talking order of magnitude improvements over 4G? Cause right now all I hear is that 5G achieves faster speeds and added throughput by simply putting more towers and access points around. That doe…

[deleted]