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

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141–150 of 433 posts

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

#141
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 Sil…

Funny how people even on a tech website seems to be stuck at "640 KB is enough for everyone".

When technology gets a lot cheaper, a lot more powerful, a lot less power consuming, the magic of the market creates completely new categories of use that unlock new demand at consumers.

Right now your phone has a sim-card. There might be one in your tablet or your car too. But there is not one in your TV or the lights in your bathroom. But at some point telecommunications technology is going to be so cheap that drawing a wire to connect a button to a light is going to be the expensive option.

5G is a step on the way.

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

#142
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?

You only need about 70 Kbit/second to use 22 GB in a month. Would you be happy with a wireless plan that only gave you 70 Kbit/second? Probably not.

For the large number of people, probably a majority, who in most months don't hit their caps their two main annoyances with wireless performance are poor signal and things taking too long.

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

#143
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd love to hear this, sounds cringey. Edit: weird it's a 3 short episode advertisement thing, a "live-read" ad in an interview format. These Pop science people are a great marketing/hype vector. I'm curious how much AT&T paid for this. https://youtu.be/EccF6jR3CFo https://youtu.be/n5AWdU75c1w https://youtu.be/UKaIg102CAU The ATT guy said 5g will solve bike deaths by having your bike talk to the stop light and other…

The ATT guy said 5g will solve bike deaths by having your bike talk to the stop light and other cars, but with machine learning!

Reminds me of all the garbage that went around in the transition from AMPS to digital. I had a co-worker tell me her phone was better than mine because mine was only Edge, but hers was PCS!

The AT&T guy should have put an "e" in front of it to tap the nostalgia for 90's marketing nonsense.

eMachines, eBike, etailor, etc...

People will love 5G because it's one more G than 4G. And then AT&T can call it's version 6Ge.

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

#144
post #3
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.

It might unblock new products. Being uneducated on 5g in particular, low latency fast internet can result in proliferation of mobile ar/ve devices, and bring internet to towns that otherwise dont have cable/fiber wiring, etc. There are some efforts in robotics that would have much better ux if they had faster internet in remote places. You can imagine stadia running on mobile on the extreme. Everything cloud streamed…

There are definitely a lot of ideas and research behind them that are just waiting for more accessible low-latency internet connections. Robotic surgery was an interesting one for me, as the latency was a tremendous bottleneck for remote applications.

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

#145
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Sil…

Funny how people even on a tech website seems to be stuck at "640 KB is enough for everyone". When technology gets a lot cheaper, a lot more powerful, a lot less power consuming, the magic of the market creates completely new categories of use that unlock new demand at consumers. Right now your phone has a sim-card. There might be one in your tablet or your car too. But there is not one in your TV or the lights in yo…

> But there is not one in your TV or the lights in your bathroom. But at some point telecommunications technology is going to be so cheap that drawing a wire to connect a button to a light is going to be the expensive option.

For stationary objects like TVs and lights we already have wifi, and a range of simpler low-power options used by IoT basestations. What does 5G bring to the table here?

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

#146
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Sil…

Funny how people even on a tech website seems to be stuck at "640 KB is enough for everyone". When technology gets a lot cheaper, a lot more powerful, a lot less power consuming, the magic of the market creates completely new categories of use that unlock new demand at consumers. Right now your phone has a sim-card. There might be one in your tablet or your car too. But there is not one in your TV or the lights in yo…

> drawing a wire to connect a button to a light

How are you getting power to the light?

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

#147
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Sil…

Funny how people even on a tech website seems to be stuck at "640 KB is enough for everyone". When technology gets a lot cheaper, a lot more powerful, a lot less power consuming, the magic of the market creates completely new categories of use that unlock new demand at consumers. Right now your phone has a sim-card. There might be one in your tablet or your car too. But there is not one in your TV or the lights in yo…

> But at some point telecommunications technology is going to be so cheap that drawing a wire to connect a button to a light is going to be the expensive option.

But it won't be cheap for the consumer. At best, our data plans will stay the same price. But more likely they'll rise and, well, I just don't think people give a crap enough about having a sim card in their TV to pay the extra. Maybe if you make SF money, but most people don't.

I think, too, people are starting to get teched out. Just a little for now, but it's happening.

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

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Sil…

Streaming pre-recorded video (e.g. movies) over the radio is wildly inefficient considering flash memory costs peanuts. The primary reason it's done is because we're in desperate need of copyright reform (streaming is being used by the video industry as a form of DRM.)

What copyright reform do you think we need for this?

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

#149

My city is looking at a total 5G ban. A city charter re-write is going to be needed to topple the current municipal administration. Moving to non-partisan elections would probably help since some of the current city council incumbents either didn’t graduate high school or only graduated high school over 50 years ago. Party structures protected those incumbents with this literally disconnected population.

What city is this and what are their justifications for the ban?

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

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are your thoughts on the safety concerns?

Not my area of expertise. The main study I'm aware of showing some harmful affects uses an unrealistic amount of power and curiously only showed effects for male mice. I'm hesitant to dismiss it, because effects from heating caused by non-ionizing radiation are well documented but that amount of power is just not present in cellular systems whether that's LTE or 5G NR.

I worry in particular about the towers being in close proximity to schools and housing developments.
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