Any legit concerns with 5G network frequencies?

Until today I didn’t know about the #Stop5G movement, but then I saw a seemingly rational and intelligent person using the hashtag. The stuff that came up at the top of a Google search was mostly conspiracy stuff, and one link to a scientific paper that wasn’t obviously peer reviewed.

Have any of y’all heard of real concerns with 5G technology and health, etc?

Or is this just tin-foil-hat mind-control stuff that the guy I saw posting somehow fell for?

(Debated whether this should go here or in P&R, but I’m more curious about whether any element of the technology is suspect than I am about whether there’s a shadow government preparing to secretly microwave our brains.)

The only thing I saw about it was this article about it conflicting with weather detection using passive microwaves.

The NOAA is predicting this could hurt their predictions by 2-3 days. Pai says both NASA and NOAA are working from bad data but this is Pai we are talking about. On a good day he is lucky if he can bang two sticks together, let alone critique NASA and the NOAA.

So yeah. I don’t know. Interested on hearing more as well.

Interesting. Between Ajit Pai, NASA, and NOAA, I know who I trust.

So this likely isn’t just people hearing the word “microwave” and freaking out.

Have to look into this a bit more, it seems.

This whole rush to 5G makes absolutely no sense to me. Even without the NOAA objections (which don’t seem to be small) all this investment and hype just doesn’t seem worth it. The modems and antennas are expensive (and less likely to get anywhere near 4G cost because you are pretty much forced to beam forming, thus you will always need multiple antennas), it has complete shit range making it useless to all but dense urban centers, but it also has to have line of sight (even a glass door can block the signal) which means it doesn’t even make sense in urban centers without blanketing downtown with antennas all over.

I just don’t get it.

5G isn’t just about boosted speeds, which is the part that has a very short range. It’s also about being able to handle more people per node, so there’s less congestion for everyone.

But really, why be shocked about tech moving on? I’m sure someone somewhere is already working on what 6G is going to be, just like someone is showing 8K TVs.

There will never come a time when we all look at each other and say “no thanks, there’s no need to innovate anymore, we’re good!”

What Menzo said. The biggest gains are about density.

That’s also the big push for Wifi 6 (the new naming scheme for for 802.11ax.) Though there will be faster speeds, it’s about a much higher capacity for client counts and servicing multiple clients at a time. Reliability and efficiency are at play as well.

5G isn’t just about your phone use. It’s also about companies that use mobile broadband for extra network capacity or failover for other traditional circuits.

I got 2 free months of these guys, which is a 5g home internet provider in the Boston area.

So far they’ve been great. I’m going to cancel Comcast next month if I don’t run into any problems with Starry, and that’s going to feel so so good.

Taken a couple of blocks from my house back in April:

But 5G is to transfer data to the last mile. Correct?

The problem of Australia is being there, in the corner of the map (+culture, +economic potential, +traditional abuse). Has absolutelly no relation to what 5G can do. I am correct?

Well yes but that’s the case for most mobile broadband as well. 5G is 30 to 300 GHz (from what I’ve read,) which will be an additional range that isn’t covered by 4G which is 2 to 8 GHz.

The easist way to think of it and it’s benefits are to compare older 2.4Ghz wifi with 5Ghz wifi. Remember how we get a little less range? But also remember how much faster speeds we get, better resiliency and connections (while in range) etc?

That’s what 5G will do for mobile broadband. Very fast speeds, much shorter wavelength (for antenna reasons,) MIMO, much higher utilization of channels, much higher density of transmission per radio, etc.

I have no idea what high frequencies like that do, but as a guess based on every other thing we’ve done, I would call most of the 5G fearmongering calls just that, fearmongering.

We just need more 5G cell towers. Lots and lots of them.

They’re pretty small and unobtrusive, too, compared to 4G towers:

(here’s a link to the article where I found that photo)

From my limited viewpoint on 5g it just seems like it isn’t really ready for market and is being pushed out too soon. The crazy short range and alleged line of sight issues point to an industry trying to take a proof of concept prototype to market.

Mass bird death notwithstanding.

Is 5G different from those little white microwave antennas that already exist? I see a ton of those in SF, both on businesses and from an ISP called Monkeybrains.

It depends, but if its an ISP, most likely they are wifi antennas. The same with metro wifi.

These are definitely microwave.

The round ones, John? Like the circular ones in this pic?

Yeah, like that.

5G is pretty uninteresting. Wifi 6 is a big deal if you live in a densely populated area.

Those circular ones are directional antennas, meaning very narrow beam. So on the tower in the picture, one is probably backhaul to the “main” tower in the area, the other probably points to the next tower down the line.

If you see those on businesses or homes, that’s usually a metro wifi ISP that goes and installs that pointing back to their closest wifi tower. That way if you sign up for wireless internet you get a fairly strong signal (and less issues.)