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

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331–340 of 433 posts

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

#331
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll admit I've quite understood this ambivalence about WAN links, and particularly not on tech sites. Consider: would you find no different on your LAN going back to 10Base-T, or being restricted exclusively to 802.11a-1999 for all networking (no wired at all) in a spectrum crowded environment, and thus with double-digit latency at all times? Or is gigabit or even higher actually useful in a variety of ways? How abo…

> 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 repeated dream. In reality thin clients suck even on a LAN. Remoting from a Windows PC to a Mac Mini sitting right next to it had unacceptable latency. Which is rather…

>A repeated dream. In reality thin clients suck even on a LAN. Remoting from a Windows PC to a Mac Mini sitting right next to it had unacceptable latency.

It's the tech you're using. It's most likely streaming jpeg images.

Try, for example, Steam Sharing, but share something like notepad. You can minimize it and it will work as remote desktop. You'll find yourself on another computer with virtually no latency, as if it is native.

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

#332

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.

That's silly. 5G can be as simple as upgrading existing poles. No new poles need to be added, because 5G works on lower frequency ranges.

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

#333
post #4

I remember the abundant “cell phones cause cancer” and “WiFi is like a microwave” scares 20 years ago, they all ended when people got their hands on nice and shiny touchscreen smartphones.

Oh, they’re still around. There was a local group protesting the installation of a cell tower too close to a school recently.

Can you personally really be sure that it's not harmful long-term? Nobody has been able to study the effects of this stuff long-term.

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

#334
post #211
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take a look into 5g, eg Verizon, - it’s aimed to be last mile competition, and have the same caps. Comcast is capped at 200gb, I imagine 5g would be similar.

It seems the cap is not a universal constant - my cap with Comcast is actually 1024GB. I honestly thought 1024GB was enough that I'd never actually get very close to it, but wow, I don't have a single month under 200GB. In fact, most months are above 500GB for me. Of course not everyone uses 500GB a month. But still, I think the data cap story has to change if 5G is really to compete with other last mile options. Als…

Verizon 5g home is uncapped, 300mps, and $50-$70/mo.

That’s already better than Comcast for me - faster and cheaper. Soon as they come to my town I’m switching.

But the main point is that competition will drive down prices even more.

I don’t think you appreciate what 5g is - it’s not just an improvement over 4g in speed (LTE is already fast enough), it’s a dramatic improvement in the throughput per square mile. The caps in place today are preventing small number of people from hogging the bandwidth in the area, which is no longer a problem.

https://www.verizonwireless.com/support/5g-home-faqs/

https://www.verizonwireless.com/5g/home/?cmp=KNC-C-HQ-PRO-R-...

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

#335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man your view couldn't be more myopic and shortsighted if it tried.

That's fine. Prove me wrong. That's the point to a discussion. You share points of view. But if I follow your path of discourse, I could just say you're a sheep that'll believe whatever silicon valley tells you.

Hey man, I get what you're trying to do and it works on reddit and hackernews, but in real life, it sucks when talking with a person who always wants a debate (re: You saying that's the point of a discussion). Stupid people like me (maybe southern attitudes?) sometimes just encourage whatever someone is talking about. If they're talking about 5G and how it could improve society, you could help them think of ideas that would work in that system rather than just begging them to prove you wrong.

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

#336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the point. We don't know all of the future applications. But it's very unlikely to be nothing interesting. Do you think everyday appliances in the 50 years will function essentially the same as today? It's a very general enhancement in capability with lots of potential but currently unknown use cases. I say this while also recognizing that most IoT stuff today is overhyped BS.

Yes? A refrigerator will still keep things cold. A stove will still heat things up. An AC will still AC. Other than home automation systems that go belly up when their servers go offline, most things do the same thing they did 50 years ago. 5g isn't revolutionary.

Doing something substantially faster almost always leads to a revolution in it: internet, manufacturing, cars, planes, computers.

At every step, you could always say "it is just faster". Only in retrospect can you ever see how world changing "faster" was.

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

#337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, they’re still around. There was a local group protesting the installation of a cell tower too close to a school recently.

Can you personally really be sure that it's not harmful long-term? Nobody has been able to study the effects of this stuff long-term.

Yes. The physics of radiation and it’s medical impact is the single most studied subject in the history of such things, thanks to untold trillions sunk into research and development of nuclear weapons.

Ionizing radiation cause DNA damage and cancer, the damage level can be both computed and measured.

Non-ionizing radiation only causes temperature increase - lightbulb and microwave alike. The only difference is how deep the heat penetrates, and how many watts are pumped into the subject. The WiFi router is damaging in the same way as a very small lightbulb, and much less so than sitting in the sun.

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

#338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Hopefully we don't get there before proper regulation of tech companies is put in place.

Is it not already the expensive option when a cheap microphone+chip can be embedded in a light as The Clapper? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clapper When you can have a smartbulb and a smartphone app, if you already have a smartphone and wifi access point? When you can buy a wireless doorbell system for $12 which is a free-floating button and triggers a mains powered doorbell remotely? https://www.amazon.com/wire…

None of those things have SIM cards.

I wonder over the long run which is better - hard wiring or using batteries?

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

#339
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.)

I work at an ISP and even internally people are parotting this '5G will change the world'. They said it about 4G as well, and sure, a lot became possible with mobile devices because of it. But all in all, it's just faster internet.

Umm.. 4g did change the world though. "Just faster internet" is like calling the planes "just a faster truck"

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

#340
I have this feeling that 5G is more about cheaply deploying faster Internet (ie. comment about these things going up next to people’s bedrooms) versus a more expensive fiber deployment to the premises.

Having driven around Dallas and seen a few of these things in residential areas, I can say that yes they are ugly. Unlike a regular cell site, it doesn’t appear that there is any kind of permitting process around these deployments as they just pop up suddenly.

I’m all for progress, but there are ways to make utility infrastructure less noticeable to the urban landscape. Unfortunately with the approach I’m seeing with 5G deployments, the telecom companies will take the cheap way out.

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