Theoretically, 5G will use a higher frequency band of radiation (24Ghz-86Ghz). This band has a harder time penetrating obstacles, so you will need many more transmitters at a higher power level to cover an area.

Opponents are uncomfortable with the enthusiasm of the telecom companies over 5G without sufficient (they feel) long-term research on the health effects of saturating entire neighborhoods with millimeter-wave radiation 24/7. Residents of these areas will be exposed to this radiation whether they use it or not - there is no opt-out.

There is some quackery in this space (i.e. cures for "radiation sickness," etc.), but I don't consider it blameworthy to have caution concerning new technology in general, especially when the benefits of 5G to the consumer are so dubious. It seems to me like a push by the telecoms to re-implement wireless internet on their terms from the ground up in as many areas as they can before public opinion forces neutrality back on them again.

I also don't think they'll actually succeed (at least in America anyway), but mostly end up selling people the same product under the label "5G LTE" or something.

The mmwave range is only one of the 5G ranges. 5G will also use the same ranges as 3G and 4G.

In the mmwave range transmitters will not have to transmit higher power levels. First because the use-case for this range is when there is NO obstacles to go through (it does not really work otherwise...), in short distance situations, and then also because beam forming will always be used.

> especially when the benefits of 5G to the consumer are so dubious

Benefits are not limited to browsing speed on your smartphone.

5G is designed to be able to handle massive number of connected devices (e.g. IoT), very low latency (e.g. self-driving cars, industrial control), and very high reliability (industrial control, etc)

> the use-case for this range is when there is NO obstacles to go through (it does not really work otherwise...)

So, on the one hand, 5G is going to make unicorns fly down and carry us to the heavens on wings of pure data, and on the other hand, it can't go through walls...?

Research shows that two thirds of consumers are not willing to pay even $1 more for 5G internet. [0] Regardless of the promises companies are making to each other and consumers today, the demand for 5G just doesn't seem consumer-driven.

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[0] https://www.pwc.com/us/en/services/consulting/library/consum...

Most data are consumed indoor anyway, so mmwave will likely be used through indoor micro cells. mmwave also allows to boost capacity.

As already written in my previous comment, 5G is not just about faster internet. Other use-cases are as important, if not more. Operators know they can't charge consumers extra.

This!

You can put a mmwave basestation in a factory (a couple of cells near the ceiling) and controll everything (machines, "robots", transporters, forklifts, inventory,...) via LTE.

But why not just use wifi then ?

Wifi has low capacity (in terms of number of connected devices) and offers no guarantee on anything (latency, reliability). It is not suited for critical and industrial applications.

Right, so far we've learned:

1) 5G improves wireless internet - though it only works over short-range and can't go through walls.

2) 5G needs a massive deployment of new devices to reach consumers - though most consumers are not willing to pay even $1 more for 5G.

3) 5G is a prerequisite for amazing new tech like IoT and self-driving cars - many of which already exist and will continue to use existing 3G and 4G bands.

"Dubious" is actually me being generous!

You're obsessed with "5G can't go through walls". This is a meme and does a dis-service to your knowledge.

5G reuses existing 3G and 4G frequencies, but with better rf management (among other things). The mmwave frequencies are to address mass-crowd scenarios, which currently today already cause 4G DAS deployments to almost burst at the seams.

These are not "my" opinions. These are the current state of affairs re RF management and planning.

Well, it might be unsophisticated of me to belabor my point, but it doesn't take a genius to see that there are major technical drawbacks with 5G, and the industry has not been successful in convincing consumers to buy into the hype.

Telcos are blowing $26 billion on this new tech, so I think it's important to question how they're going to make that money back. If you read how the industry itself answers this question, hint: it's not self-driving cars. It is 5G network slicing. The current wireless infrastructure is built on net neutrality, so they cannot differentiate traffic without rebuilding it all from scratch. That is the real reason behind the $26 billion rollout and millions of new devices. They need to rebuild the internet to charge enterprise customers high prices and 5G is just how they decided to market this project to the public. They need to do this before the political environment changes or else they lose their opportunity.

>3) 5G is a prerequisite for amazing new tech like IoT and self-driving cars - many of which already exist and will continue to use existing 3G and 4G bands

That sounds like marketing hype from an ISP.

A self-driving car that is dependent on a radio network to operate is by defonition, not self-driving.

You've never been in an expo hall with 10k people all trying to post an instagram photo, have you?

So the solution is the radiate the entire group of people for instagram?

It's already radiated, but now with less power.

5G is safer than previous tech (3-5 orders safer than radio that has been around for something like 2 centuries).

As already said, this will use beam forming, which means that the radio energy is focused at the receiver.

This means less interference to others around, and higher capacity.

> So, on the one hand, 5G is going to make unicorns fly down and carry us to the heavens on wings of pure data, and on the other hand, it can't go through walls...?

This fact has nothing to do with 5G. It is physics. A high-frequency carrier is not able to penetrate objects as well as it does with a lower frequency.

The short range and poor transmission of the higher frequencies leads me to speculate that the intended use case is micro cells that replace wifi. There will be a micro cell in every conference room and hotel lobby.

This is a very precise answer. Still, there is need for more cells as grandparent points out, and those cells will be closer to ground level than before.

Other anticipated benefits are providing connectivity to fast vehicles (for example high speed trains) and providing mobile internet to whole buildings in situations where it's cheaper or more convenient than fiber optics or copper.

Its a tin foil hat thing. The mmWave frequencies are only going to be used in high population dense areas and will run at a lower power. Other than this, 5G will operate much like LTE with a few additions like beamforming antenna arrays. Frequency has very little to do with health risk until you get into MUCH higher frequencies than what we operate in. Its about output power, and this is federally regulated by most countries.

For those that are curious, the wavelength of 86Ghz radiation is about 3mm.

It's a tin foil hat thing. It's just wireless frequencies -- which may have some minor impact but it wouldn't be any different to 4G or 3G really and you can see that tech came and hasn't caused any major health issues.

Well, it's higher frequency resulting in high localized absorption, so it's not no different from 4G or 3G.

(I haven't seen any credible study saying it actually increases cancer risk, but from first principles, 5G increasing cancer risk, particularly skin cancer risk, doesn't seem all that absurd, similar to how sunlight increases cancer risk)

60GHz is much, much, much lower than any UV. (UVA is mainly responsible for skin aging (photoaging), and it's above visible light, and visible light starts at around 400 TeraHerz.)

Unfortunately, a statement like that, has just as much value as the conspiracy theory. Since 5G is a vastly different technology, the only thing we can say for certain is that we don't know the health risks at this point.

We know how the wavelengths penetrate into the body and how much power goes into the skin. In new 60 Ghz 5G wavelengths skin reflects 20-30% of the power and the rest is almost completely absorbed by the epidermis. Overall the power densities are so slow that there is no reason to except anything.

Exposing skin to the sun is known radiation hazard. If you go outside during daytime why worry about 5G?

> skin reflects 20-30% of the power and the rest is almost completely absorbed by the epidermis.

So 70% of the energy is absorbed by the skin. What does that much energy at those freqs do to the epidermis? I don't know, you don't know. I'm not saying you're making a case for the conspiracy theories, but you're certainly not making one against them.

> If you go outside during daytime why worry about 5G?

If you go outside during daytime on an Australian summer day without sunscreen including underneath your clothing, you're going to get severe sunburn and permanently increase your chance of skin cancer in under 15 minutes. We have public awareness campaigns about this on TV and everything. Not a great comparison.

I have no idea whether 5g freq ranges and power have health impacts, I'm just saying that clearly you don't either.

You could repeat everything you said for 2.450 MHz and sound plausible, except that's the frequency of microwave ovens that cook things including humans. Do any molecules resonate at 5g freqs? I have no idea, neither do you.

Molecules don't resonate at 5G frequencies.. even with 5G mmWave, the wavelengths are about 10,000x too long (millimeters). It's like riding on a cruise ship in the ocean and worrying that the wine glass in your hand is going to resonate and shatter from the ocean waves.

The impact on tissue is still thermal.. and the power flux densities of 5G are small compared to the sun, especially so because RF bandwidths are tiny compared to the blackbody radiation spectrum of the sun.

You would have to show why these RF transmissions are more pathological than the random process EM waves generated by solar blackbody. If you look at a modern cellular OFDM waveform, it is almost statistically indistinguishable from broadband noise. It had the same Peak to average power ratio, the same flat spectral bandwidths, and the same affinity to causing resonances--its just much much lower in amplitude than solar.

All polar molecules will react to all EM fields. (did you know you can bend a water stream with a magnet?).

The wavelength of microwave ovens is even longer, at 6.66cm. And yet that's the rotational resonant frequency of water. Weird, huh? By the way, you can confirm this with a single slice of cheese with the turnplate removed and then calculate the speed of light from the burn marks on that cheese being 3.33cm apart :)

The only question is whether that reaction at any given frequency has any impact on the larger system those molecules are part of.

The answer is scientists aren't sure because they haven't had a chance to experiment much, and you and I are sure as shit not qualified to comment on it.

I'm not going to don a tinfoil hat over 5g rollouts, but this cavalier attitude of just expecting everything to be fine without any meaningful testing is just as bad if not worse than the conspiracy theories.

Microwave ovens are not very narrowband and certainly do not excite 'rotational resonances of water'. The periodic burn marks on your cheese are from coarse standing waves within the microwave oven cavity (related to the magnetron resonance and spacing of the walls).. it has nothing to do with molecular resonances.

EDIT: the reason it cooks food is the intensity of the field strength (1 kilowatt per cubic ft, or ~27,000 watts per cubic meter) in a microwave oven. 5G signals are tens of microwatts (millionths of a watt) per cubic meter. That's a difference of a factor of 10's of billions.

Please explain the mechanism for the 2.45Mhz microwave oven cooking food and how that rules out the possibility of the 5g band having unintended interactions with molecules found in living organisms. You can settle this debate for the EU and save them a few million bucks worth of studies.

power in a microwave oven: 1000 watt

power from your phone: 0.2 watt in case of LTE.

reveived power from a basestation: around -40 to -120 dbm.

ERP of base station: up to 500W per channel.

You are 100% sure that will have absolutely no impact on insects or birds in close proximity to it?

More like 200W with LTE.

But even if it would be 500W, no haven't heared of it. Which does not mean that it could happen. But then again the question was not a) insects or birds or b) close proximity (which is what, close then 1m?)

>The wavelength of microwave ovens is even longer, at 6.66cm. And yet that's the rotational resonant frequency of water. Weird, huh? By the way, you can confirm this with a single slice of cheese with the turnplate removed and then calculate the speed of light from the burn marks on that cheese being 3.33cm apart :)

Not really. 2.4GHz was chosen because it allowed to built microwave ovens at that particular size and because nobody cares about the 2.4GHz range. You can build 900 MHz ovens too, there are some, mainly for industrial usage.

All EM waves can interact with molecules in our bodies, that’s true.

But all of the interaction is thermal, not ionizing. And the energy levels are so tiny that the thermal impact is much less than the thermal impact of opening or closing a window on a warm day.

Microwave ovens have thermal interactions with the food inside them, because the microwave runs at tens of thousands of times higher power than is used for radio frequency signaling.

2.4 GHz WiFi isn’t microwaving our bodies, and neither will 5G.

Restricting the harm window to ionising radiation is a red herring.

We know that magnetic fields alone have very apparent interactions with humans and other living organisms[1].

The only mitigating factor here is the TRP, but at the FCC limit of 500 watts ERP per channel, that's actually not too far off from microwave ovens. I doubt it'll hurt humans unless they happen to live in the immediate path of an eNodeB, but I don't think either one of us is qualified to speculate about what it'll do to inspects and birds that will pass much closer to it.

Your wifi router isn't cooking you because it's at a significantly lower ERP than a microwave oven, but the same is not true for a mobile cell.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_magnetic_stimulat...

I will not dispute that if you are less than a meter from a transmitting cell tower, you might be uncomfortable.

But the induced magnetic fields from this level of power, dispersed at an inverse square rate, which isn’t penetrating far past the skin, just doesn’t seem reasonable to fear.

> What does that much energy at those freqs do to the epidermis

It's mostly dead cells, so not much.

It's true that we don't have the full picture. Nothing is certain yet, but the most likely health effects will be indirect. Two areas of concern are effects on insect populations, which are already in collapse, and effects on bacterial development, including potentially causing resistance to antibiotics. These studies would be a good place to start if you're interested in more information:

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-22271-3

https://doi.org/10.3109/1040841X.2012.691461

The bactericidal effects study is behind a paywall (but seems to be readable here: https://www.academia.edu/10777146/Bactericidal_effects_of_lo... )

See also: 53GHz has some anti-microbial effects when combined with antibiotics: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265134435_The_Enhan...

Interestingly the antibiotic resistance is only seen in one particular number on a graph, whereas the other numbers show that EMF seems "beneficial" as it is slowing bacterial growth. Naturally the question is, what happens if you throw human tissue in the mix too.

Thanks for the alert to the paywall and the comments. I had originally read it on Nature and included the reference provided on the article.

The lack of consistency in results is definitely an issue, and it's true that it may be turn out to be a net benefit overall, which is why I believe we still don't have a clear understanding of the situation. Considering that bacteria adapt to their environment, we may see further unpredictable effects. The risk as I see it is not knowing how it may turn out before deploying it on a massive scale.

Alternative link for second reference with no paywall: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-35486-1

Sounds like the same thing they said for 2g, 3g, 4g and Wifi. As long as I don't see a big epidemic of brain tumors or something related, I'll take these claims with a pinch of salt.

I'm no conspiracy theorist, but am a cancer survivor, and feel compelled to reply that many forms of cancer have incubation periods [so to speak] approaching 20 years. So your salt is premature.

And mobile phones have existed for 40 years, gsm for almost 30. Considering the most radiation is outputed during the phone conversations, and most people hold their phone always on the same side of the head (irradiating only that half), detecting an epidemic of mobile phone radiation sicknesses would be easy, if there were any.

Funny I would call it almost the same. It's 4g plus channel coding, massive mimo, beamforming and more ML which influences the spectrum choices.

The vastly different is a marketing term.

There is "5G" with mmWave and "5G" without mmWave, you've described the latter.

No, actually I described mmave. Just google the words I put in my post and see where it leads you.

The problem is that most of the industry, when they think of 5G, just want to send as many 4k streams as possible everywhere.

No I know what those are. But the industry has generally separated a "5G without mmWave" and a "5G with mmWave" as two stages of evolution. Massive MIMO, directional/beamforming, various ML techniques, improved coding, etc. generally fall into the former category

>the only thing we can say for certain is that we don't know the health risks at this point.

Nope, we know for certain it doesn't immediately cause irrepairable negative health damage that can be observed in a lab setting because this would have already been tested.

> Since 5G is a vastly different technology

5G is not a vastly different technology. There are some very novel tricks under the hood, but it's still just fancy radios.

5G is still using radio frequency waves like every wireless communication device for the last 50 years.

Vastly different how?

Wavelength and hardware.

Hardware, well obviously.

Wavelength not so much. From 700MHz to 5 GHz everything is in use. Now 3.4GHz (main 5G frequency) is right inbetween. Nearly noone is trying to build 5G networks with the high frequencies starting from 24GHz because you have a) no range and b) line of sight is preferred.

I think the main concern comes from the mM-wave frequencies from what I've read. The others are more of the same, but a lot of what I've seen--and I can't remember where at the moment--focused exclusively on the high frequency nodes that would (theoretically) be deployed in urban areas.

People don't realize they're exposed to mmwave already. If you're on a jet or ship, in sight of a jet or ship, near an airport (not just going through a body scanner), near a weather radar station, within line of sight of a microwave relay tower, walking through automatic doors, or driving, your body is absorbing mmwave RF from something. All of those sources are from radar, which is a lot more common than one might think.

5G is not a vastly different technology

Lack of evidence is not evidence of falsehood. Strong magnetic fields can make you forget things. No one know what sort of effect wrought by weak EM radiation exposure over decades. Some of us would like to err on the side of caution, if feasible. Just like GMO and organic food.

"strong magnetic fields can make you forget things"

source?

(Not OP.)

I thought TMS can do that, after all it can do the reverse: https://neurosciencenews.com/memory-loss-reversed-tms-12006/

There are some adverse effects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_magnetic_stimulat...

I feel like that philosophy is like "never look down, for fear you might have to come to terms with the giants whose shoulders you stand on."

One of the tougher individual questions are 'how should one deal in societal stances one doesn't personally agree with, but tacitly relies upon society at large to in fact take those disagreeable stances?' war, defense, vaccines, GMO's, wireless communications.

I call these the "you need me on that wall" things.

Are you aware of any longitudinal studies on the effect of wireless internet (or even electricity in general) on human health to prove your point?

Russian propagandists found a new bone to latch on to and sow chaos in the world (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/science/5g-phone-safety-h...). Meanwhile Huawei and Ericsson are building 5G networks in Russia with full support from its government.

I think one of the concerns is in the past a cell tower would cover a large area and thus not many people were close to them.

Now with 5G towers and their much shorter range people are finding these all over the place, in cities on nearly every block and thus many more people are much closer to the towers than before.

It looks to me like it's the newest battleground of the anti-vax movement. Thank god no kids need to die from it this time around.

A big part of it is Russia. RT has been pushing 5G scare videos for a while, and a lot of blogs have picked up the claims and mention them without citing the source. Here's a comment from a couple months ago with links to several of the RT videos if you are curious [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20788559

5G safety is a long story, but the tl;dr is that it's not something to worry about. I tried to explain this a while back in a long thread here on HN. I tried to cite many scientific articles with more details. Please refer to that if you'd like. Maybe I'll write a blog post some day.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20454375

I've lost faith in industry funded research. After all PFOA and GenX got approved for use in teflon and that stuff is most definitely toxic.

Maybe we all could benefit from being a little more paranoid.

> for now

so worry when it's too late?

Ok, updated the phrasing to remove that part. I am not convinced there is anything to worry about for consumers. There may be some safety precautions that need to be taken for maintenance / installation of cell sites (in addition to the current safety measures).

No. 2.4 GHz is in use, as is 5 GHz. Now suddenly 3.4 GHz is a problem?

Pardon my ignorance, but aren't other factors besides frequency (power? distance?) relevant too?

True, but those apply to all.

60GHz is the real new and shiny thing that makes some people worry.

I doubt those will be used much. No range and line of sight is required.

Busy streets, corners, plazas, indoor whatevers, and so on.

Furthermore the end goal is natural convergence with WiFi. The telcos already are pushing Ethernet more and more (backhaul and fronthaul), of course over fibre (because bandwidth requirements, and timing has to be calibrated to microseconds because radio symbols are being encapsulated in Ethernet).

MP-TCP has been recently merged to the kernel, it was already enabled on a lot of phones.

What's missing are ways to allow hosting secure hybrid-cells/APs so telcos are able and willing to offload traffic.

I think there is totally something to it. I mean Brussels halted the roll out over these very concerns.

EU environment minister Céline Fremault: "The people of Brussels are not guinea pigs whose health I can sell at a profit. We cannot leave anything to doubt.”

https://www.fiercewireless.com/5g/brussels-halts-5g-plans-ov...