5G Is Likely to Put Weather Forecasting at Risk

https://hackaday.com/2019/04/16/5g-buildout-likely-to-put-weather-forecasting-at-risk/

by szczys • 7 years ago

668 464 7 years ago

derekp73• 7 years ago

I was wondering, what exactly 5G will bring us. For the most part, all the tasks I need to do on a phone (pocket computer / communicator) can be done even with 3G (video, streaming music, and any website's loading time is more than acceptable at 3G speeds).

The only thing I can think of is 5G will allow for more overall network bandwidth, so the data caps on "unlimited" plans wouldn't be needed. But compared to how we use our phones today, what new items will be be able to do with 5G that we can't do with current 4G/LTE?

joshmn• 7 years ago

so the data caps on "unlimited" plans wouldn't be needed

They're not even needed now. It's all about money.

cheerlessbog• 7 years ago

Right, I doubt it really costs Verizon $15 to provide me an extra gigabyte..

rhino369• 7 years ago

It’s somewhat needed. 15 dollars a gb is just to raise revenue.

But a truly unlimited 4G hotspot service would crawl to stop during busy periods.

Some sort of rationing is needed.

tomschlick• 7 years ago

I was wondering, what exactly 5G will bring us.

WISP internet service to the home.

derekp73• 7 years ago

Again, looking for the advantage -- in this case, I can see WISP being useful for areas that are underserved by the local cable monopoly, and in other areas it provides a third competitor (cable/dsl/wisp).

I wonder how 5G home internet will compare to the up and coming LEO satellite constellations (StarLink for example).

wl• 7 years ago

WISP is very useful in rural areas. It's less compelling as an alternative to wired services in the dense urban environments where we'll see 5G deployments. You're going to have to run all that fiber, anyway.

microcolonel2• 7 years ago

The problem is that the new spectrum is not appropriate for that purpose for the exact same reason it interferes with weather forecasting equipment.

ronnier• 7 years ago

Have a decent connection where there’s a large gathering of people.

KJKingJ• 7 years ago

Very much so. Sure, the headline speeds of 5G are nice (and indeed currently with the right 4G deployments and equipment, you can certainly get some phenomenal speeds today), but like all major network upgrades the primary benefit for typical users is aggregate capacity. That seemingly pointless headline speed doesn't quite happen when you've got 100s or 1000s of people in an area, what it does result in though is a usable speed for all of those people instead of an unusable one.

toomuchtodo5• 7 years ago

802.11ax ("WiFI 6") supports this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ax#Technical_improv...

dx0343• 7 years ago

With the same backbone infrastructure? Wouldn't you need more cell towers for this? From my experience, areas that constantly have large crowds often work well with 4G, just the occasional bursts don't work.

cobookman2• 7 years ago

4G offers enough speed to replace my home internet connection, however aggregate bandwidth at the cell towers prevented this.

I assume with 5G we're just about at the point where you could ditch the home internet connection and go 100% cellular.

folkrav2• 7 years ago

The average home connection in Canada is something around 15-20Mbps, IIRC. Your average 4G is already faster than that. I get similar speeds on average on my phone compared to my home internet.

The two reasons I still have dedicated home internet at this point are data caps and latency (gaming). Otherwise, my phone usually gets comparable - or better! - speeds than my home connection.

pivo3• 7 years ago

It's not cell phone service, but I get my home internet via 5G from Starry (https://starry.com). Speeds are between 200-300MbS (symmetric upload/download) for $50/mo. It's really been fantastic in the six months or so that I've had it. They've got their own towers and repeaters on buildings here in Boston. Couldn't be happier with them and with being able to ditch Comcast.

ip262• 7 years ago

However, due to limited range, they'll have to put up 5G stations every couple houses, and they'll have to get wired internet to the station... I wonder if you'll be able to buy your own station, or if you'll have to use the crappy utility-provided power-wasting box? To get adequate service to the station, they'll need some kind of high bandwidth link pretty much right to your street, perhaps coax or fiber...

amalcon• 7 years ago

Demand for bandwidth has historically expanded to match the bandwidth available. Folks will find some use for it.

swamp40• 7 years ago

Multiple 8K 90Hz VR streams for the whole family to play Roblox 2025, all running off a personal hotspot.

MrMember2• 7 years ago

With data caps I don't see much use for it. I still think it's hilarious that carriers advertise download speeds that would blow through most people's monthly data allowance in at most a couple of minutes.

mathieuh• 7 years ago

It would blow through your allowance if you downloaded something at that speed, constantly. Maybe other people understand it differently but I’ve always understood those ads as like ads for a top speed on a car. You’ll never go that fast normally, but you can if you need to.

People will continue downloading < 1 MB per request, it will just be much faster

dhimes• 7 years ago

I think this is a great point. With fast internet, my fear is that websites will load more and more crapola, eating our bandwidth, so basically we will indeed be buying 3 minutes of internet per month.

microcolonel2• 7 years ago

I'm thinking it's probably an ingenious marketing move intended to force the people to install equipment from a certain country despite concerns, in order to keep up appearances that investments are being made in the technology.

From a consumer perspective, LTE's great in its current form, I've never seen any actual person complain about network speeds in a region where LTE is properly deployed, I don't know of any application that struggles on this infrastructure.

kalleboo4• 7 years ago

The most common suggestions I see are mobile applications that benefit from the lower latency afforded by 5G - stuff like VR/AR, gaming, self-driving cars.

Aside from that the real reason money is being poured into 5G appears to be to replace the last mile / home internet.

JohnFen9• 7 years ago

the real reason money is being poured into 5G appears to be to replace the last mile / home internet.

In order to be a realistic alternative for internet service, the cost would have to come WAY down. Using the cell system for your primary internet feed right now is prohibitively expensive.

I have a hard time believing that the cell companies will actually lower their pricing for 5G. It seems more likely that they'll do the exact opposite.

szczys• 7 years ago

You should listen to Shahriar Shahramian on The Amp Hour Podcast: https://theamphour.com/430-shahriar-discusses-5g/

There's a ton of interesting things, like 5G is for a lot more than cellphones. I've always heard that 5G will have phased array and I wondered how that would work -- he talks about possibility that the array is on the roof of a car and your devices will connect back to that. Lots of issues, like size of antenna and power consumption, to get those blazing fast speeds.

i_call_solo• 7 years ago

You're making the assumption that 5G and future advanced wireless systems are exclusive to phones. In the future this will not be the case at all.

johnmoberg• 7 years ago

One use case could be high resolution, low latency video streaming for remote control of autonomous vehicles, e.g. trucks.

Phlarp4• 7 years ago

Driving a semi-truck remotely? What could possibly go wrong!

posixplz• 7 years ago

Nothing, really. The bottleneck for cell data throughout (and latency) is backhaul. Improving backhaul isn’t sexy like changing the “4” to a “5”. Improving backhaul is a very expensive (and slow). And counter to one’a business goals - telecoms in the US want just the right amount of congestion to justify network upgrade subsidies, even if that means they do not adhere to ITU-T requirements.

The best “feature” of 5G is that it’s a great opportunity institute rate-hikes.

bluedino• 7 years ago

> The best “feature” of 5G is that it’s a great opportunity institute > rate-hikes.

I can see it now. "$100 additional per month" But you can cancel your cable/DSL now!

neom• 7 years ago

Ajit Pai seems to think it's about: Rural Connectivity. Fiber Infrastructure. National Competitiveness: https://youtu.be/jKbAdEVOaDY?t=406 (Ajit starts around the 8 minute mark)

munificent• 7 years ago

Do his words actually carry any information? My understanding is that he is one of the least credible, least respected humans on the face of the planet.

JohnFen9• 7 years ago

Ajit Pai has exactly zero credibility.

willio58• 7 years ago

He's one of those people the internet is right to hate

robmiller• 7 years ago

5G attempts to market a compelling reason to upgrade a phone and stave off the slowing phone replacement cycle?

jdietrich2• 7 years ago

But compared to how we use our phones today, what new items will be be able to do with 5G that we can't do with current 4G/LTE?

5G has the potential to provide throughput and latency that is comparable to a fixed broadband connection. In reasonably competitive markets (i.e. not the US), that's A Big Deal. Latency is a particularly acute issue in many applications; 4G generally adds about 50ms in the best case scenario, but 5G can easily provide sub-millisecond latency. Imagine a near-future where it simply doesn't matter whether you're on WiFi or cellular, because they both provide the same experience.

kevas• 7 years ago

You say that it provides sub-millisecond latency.

-- Keep in mind that I know nothing of nothing.--

--- Is the sub-millisecond from repeater to repeater or from origin to final destination that's [n] repeaters away? Won't each repeater introduce its own latency?

What causes the 4G's >50ms response time?

ketzu2• 7 years ago

But the sub millisecond latency is only for local communication, isn't it? Which is most likely not available for most applications that phones use.

bestham• 7 years ago

5G non stand alone can provide this due to the new core network. But we are still at the mercy of the speed of light. A round trip of 1 millisecond translates to about 150 km (95 miles) of distance between you and your resource. And that is without any signal processing at the receiving end and in the air to fiber interface.

drdaeman• 7 years ago

I think I've read something about significant improvements to latency. Don't know if true or not.

Latency-sensitive applications over 4G/LTE, like SSH or games feel sort of sluggish.

module00002• 7 years ago

Human(individual) customers won't reap the huge benefit IMO. This is a big step up for commercial sites though, where cellular modems serve as fail-over for fiber/commodity service. These customers typically have unlimited data plans, and are more than happy to pay any outrageous data fees that keeps their network operating.

kllrnohj3• 7 years ago

can be done even with 3G (video, streaming music, and any website's loading time is more than acceptable at 3G speeds).

I think you forgot how slow 3G was/is. It's around 512KBps. You can stream music on that, but streaming video is a straight nope (480p on youtube wouldn't even be happy with 3G) and even just browsing the web will be a frustratingly slow experience.

4G LTE definitely has the bandwidth to do all those things are reasonable quality/throughput particularly for the resolution & form factor of the device in question, though.

kalleboo4• 7 years ago

"3G" also encompasses HSPA which supports real-world speeds in the 10s of megabits.

The original 3G UMTS (384kbps) was indeed dreadfully slow by today's standards.

JohnFen9• 7 years ago

As near as I can tell, the only benefit that consumers will see from 5G is that it will resolve a real problem with the cell system right now: capacity.

In very congested areas, the total supportable capacity is already being completely utilized. This is why people in very congested areas experience call drops or problems with network availability. 5G would go far to resolve this.

However, that's the only consumer-level benefit that seems realistic to me, and it would only be noticed by the people in dense areas. All the other stuff, such as increased speeds, etc., appears to be nonsense.

Jeff_Brown• 7 years ago

So how hard is it to limit the 5G signal to bandwidths that don't interfere with weather forecasting, and how hard is it to detect and enforce laws against such bandwidth spillover?

toomuchtodo5• 7 years ago

Easy to detect, hard to overcome cellular network lobbyists.

wyldfire2• 7 years ago

detect and enforce laws against such bandwidth spillover?

This phenomenon is called adjacent-channel interference and violations can and would be enforced by the FCC. The challenge isn't detection or enforcement, it's the challenge of the different government agencies to balance the people's needs properly.

FCC wants to auction off the spectrum to benefit telcos and their customers. NOAA wants to protect people with accurate predictions of hazardous weather. Your question presumes that the weather prediction function is more valuable, but the government may not reach that same conclusion.

woliveirajr• 7 years ago

Does this also mean that 5G will suck, when it’s raining? [from a comment below the article]

If 5G uses almost the same frequency where microwaves detect water vapour (around 24 GHz), won't the weather have a great impact on it?

Also, I always thought that such small waves would have problems with obstacles, with good signal just when your phone is in line-of-sight with antennas.

penagwin4• 7 years ago

That's all correct, the higher frequency suffers from worse object penetration. Solutions I've heard was that 5G would likely involve neighborhood or even building repeaters.

IMO 5G is massively overhyped. My iPhone 7+ isn't limited by 4G LTE, it's limited by Verizon deciding to only allow it 10mbps down (with great signal). 5G won't matter one bit if the current bottleneck isn't 4G LTE in the first place.

mikeash2• 7 years ago

Cell capacity is a shared resource. The reason (or part of it) that Verizon limits your speed is to let others use it too. 5G brings smaller cells and more capacity in each cell, which means less need to throttle.

SkyPuncher• 7 years ago

My iPhone 7+ isn't limited by 4G LTE, it's limited by Verizon deciding to only allow it 10mbps down (with great signal)

This is in fact a limitation of 4G.

A single device is fine, but there is only so much bandwidth available. When you get lots of devices in the same area, something has to be limited.

opencl• 7 years ago

Is Verizon really that bad? I usually get around 100mbps on TMobile LTE.

isoprophlex• 7 years ago

building repeaters

so... sorta like a WiFi access point?

darkpuma6• 7 years ago

"building repeaters"

In other words glorified wifi, except the AP is no longer owned or controlled by me.

chrisswanda• 7 years ago

It's called Rain Fade.

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

cptskippy2• 7 years ago

If 5G uses almost the same frequency where microwaves detect water vapour (around 24 GHz), won't the weather have a great impact on it?

There's a general misunderstanding about the technology that leads people down this road of thought.

5G is broken up into two frequency ranges, FR1 and FR2. FR1 is everything below 6Ghz and encompasses the same spectrum as traditional cellular technologies. FR2 is everything over 24Ghz and that's the bit everyone is confused about.

FR1 is like traditional cellular and will be slapped on cell towers to provide broad coverage over a wide area with performance characteristics similar to what we have today with LTE. It's not very exciting but it's 5G and this is what everyone is currently rolling out.

FR2 is meant to be absorbed, otherwise you'd have a big problem. Unlike FR1 which limits you to 100mhz bandwidth per channel, FR2 mandates that channel bandwidth be between 50-400mhz. So at a minimum, an FR2 channel will have half the maximum allowable bandwidth of FR1. If FR2 propagated more than a very short distance the airwaves would be quickly saturated by a small number of users.

FR2 is intended to be deployed in very dense areas like indoors. You'd be able to deploy many cell sites without worrying about overlap or signal propagation because everything from walls to moisture in the air will absorb the signals.

It might also be possible to slap an FR2 cell site on top of every lamp post going down a street.

bdamm3• 7 years ago

Wouldn't there be a great deal of contention with an FR2 on each lamp post; how would they avoid that? Are these cell sites meshing internally to create a backhaul, or is the idea that each lamp post is wired?

qwerty4561272• 7 years ago

A network of well-calibrated surface and marine weather stations and atmospheric probes is probably enough to produce reliable and precise weather forecasts in the today age of ML.

plopz• 7 years ago

Panasonic was developing a weather model incorporating data from airplanes that was supposed to be really good. But I think most models are based on physics rather than ML.

wyldfire2• 7 years ago

You can't calibrate away the RF noise introduced by transmitters that change frequently in time and space.

That's not to suggest that you cannot find a way to discriminate between the water vapor and the 5G transmissions, but you can't just take a sample on a low-humidity day and subtract that from new samples. If the metrics are below the new noise floor, merely throwing machine learning at the problem will not solve it.

qwerty4561272• 7 years ago

I don't mean taking RF data in account at all. I mean just collecting temperature, air pressure, humidity and wind speed data from many points in time-space.

cdaringe• 7 years ago

Rejecting on the grounds of no technical basis? I'd like to see more on that. I would hope when NASA raises a flag with the FCC it's taken with sincerity.

ghostly_s• 7 years ago

There are a lot of things one would hope the FCC would do that have not been happening under Ajit Pai. He's an industry shill, plain and simple.

oceliker2• 7 years ago

I’m somewhat confused. I’ll admit that I’m not very familiar with super high frequency radio, but isn’t the difference at least 200 MHz, approximately 10 times larger than the entire FM radio spectrum? Doesn’t out-of-band emission stop being a problem at that much separation? Or should we look at it relative to the base frequency?

edit: For what it's worth, I found this paragraph from the FCC last year: https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2018-14806/p-20 It sounds like they're saying "we don't know if this will be a problem yet, but be prepared to limit emissions in 23.6-24ghz range because we might require it at some point".

Also, paragraph 9 of the same document has the actual band limits (with a special requirement) if anybody is interested:

The 24 GHz band consists of two band segments: The lower segment, from 24.25-24.45 GHz, and the upper segment, from 24.75-25.25 GHz
any mobile or transportable equipment capable of operating in any portion of the 24 GHz band must be capable of operating at all frequencies within the 24 GHz band, in both band segments

borkt• 7 years ago

"At the high end of the electromagnetic spectrum, signals travel over a band of 10 million trillion Hz (that is, 10^22Hz). This end of the spectrum has phenomenal bandwidth, but it has its own set of problems. The wave forms are so miniscule that they're highly distorted by any type of interference, particularly environmental interference such as precipitation. Furthermore, higher-frequency wave forms such as x-rays, gamma rays, and cosmic rays are not very good to human physiology and therefore aren't available for us to use for communication at this point."

Not the best analysis but I'm working. Basically like any other metric, as the frequency increases the space between peaks and valleys decreases and it becomes harder to determine/separate from others 30hz to 230hz is much easier to tell the difference than 15khz to 15.2khz if you want to listen to audio tones. Once you get to microwaves this becomes of course much more difficult.

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=24687&seqNum...

oceliker2• 7 years ago

To me, this analysis sounds more about the interference with physical objects (like how 2.4ghz can pass through walls easier than 5ghz). It doesn't seem to be about interference with other radio emissions?

30hz to 230hz is much easier to tell the difference than 15khz to 15.2khz if you want to listen to audio tones

That's definitely true for humans, but I don't think it necessarily applies to radio signals in general (though it does make sense at first glance).

ummonk2• 7 years ago

It should definitely be looked at relative to the base frequency.

staticfloat• 7 years ago

While bandwidth is typically measured in absolute Hz difference due to the spread directly relating to the amount of information-carrying capacity, when you are actually generating signals many things scale with carrier frequency.

The way most of these signals are being generated is through an "information signal" (usually referred to as a modulator) being created within your device, then moved up in frequency by combining it with a "carrier signal". This separation allows the information signal's properties (such as bandwidth, modulation scheme, bitrate/Hz, etc...) to be more-or-less independent from the physical characteristics of propagation, which will be more strongly related to the carrier signal's properties (e.g. water absorption, reflection/transmission off of/through materials, etc...).

However, no process is perfect, and although we would like to generate perfect signals, we can't. Distortion appears in multiple parts of this pipeline, both in the generation of the low-frequency modulator and the high-frequency carrier. Distortion typically comes from "linear" components not being perfectly linear and thereby generating harmonics of the signal passing through them. In the case of the modulator, this splatters signal energy up and down the spectrum on the order of the bandwidth of the modulator, but in the case of the carrier it does so on the order of the carrier frequency. This is all a matter of degree and depending on the application may not be that big a deal, but it definitely must be addressed for high-density communications equipment like cell networks.

All transmitters have filters at multiple stages of their signal processing chains, both lowpass filters that filter the modulator before it's mixed with the carrier signal to boost it up in frequency, as well as bandpass filters that ensure the output stays within the bounds it's meant to be; but these filters only do so much and they can be expensive to create (as they can have rather fine physical tolerances) so everybody is always just playing the "do the best job we can for the least money" game.

Luckily, most transmitters are also connected to antennae that provide a convenient filtering on the output (they only resonate at the frequencies they transmit at) which helps for specialized systems that only operate at a single transmit frequency, but for something like 5G is less helpful, due to the many channels it supports, causing the antenna to necessarily support a wide range of frequencies.

mholt• 7 years ago

Can someone help me understand this better? What is "very close" to 23.8-GHz frequencies? I don't know which bands 5G operates on, but it seems [1] that the closest they get, at least in the US, is ~27 GHz. If the FCC is auctioning 3000 licenses for the 24 GHz space, is that the space that can potentially interfere more? Can 5G operate on just any frequencies, then?

[1] https://www.cablefree.net/wirelesstechnology/4glte/5g-freque...

TrueDuality4• 7 years ago

The carrier signal of a new technology could potentially use any frequency that isn't already in use. A lot of the frequency spectrum is already accounted for and generally parts of the spectrum that are important to scientific research are internationally protected (Such as the resonant frequency of hydrogen which is used extensively in radio astronomy).

That being said it is more technically difficult to go "up" in frequency. Lower frequencies have less bandwidth, but are easier to generate, can go through physical objects better and for longer distances.

This fight to me looks like the industry wants to use a cheaper frequency that meets their minimum technical goals (in terms of development costs not necessarily licensing costs) science and other applications be damned.

mrweasel4• 7 years ago

Europe, at least the EU has settled on 24GHz, that's pretty close to the 23.8GHz.

spaceheretostay6• 7 years ago

That's interesting - I'm working on using cell signal strength as an indicator for live weather features! There's a simple relationship between signal strength and clearness of weather - light rain has a distortion signal, heavier rain a heavier distortion, etc.

I'm betting that when all is said and done, the cell phones will help the weather forecast more than hurt it - but this may take some years if the cell companies are too greedy about it.

I'm working on detecting weather using all kinds of phone sensors like barometers and cameras in All Clear if you're interested: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.allclearwe...

and the open source sensor package: https://github.com/JacobSheehy/AllClearSensorLibrary

JohnFen9• 7 years ago

But that approach, at best, only tells you about the weather near the ground. That can be useful, but is woefully incomplete. You also need to be able to see weather high in the atmosphere.

spaceheretostay6• 7 years ago

Well, signal strength yes - it does have those limits. But pressure data from the barometers can describe some higher altitude conditions (if you can map pressure at the surface over a large geography with decent density, you can infer metrics about the higher atmosphere).

And I do agree that other instruments are required for a complete picture of the weather, not just phones! But a remarkable amount can be done from phones. GPS attenuation for example, can also be read from some Android phones and can inform about high-altitude conditions.

xd1936• 7 years ago

And radar data and satellite fills some of that need. We generally have a lot better idea what's happening in the middle atmosphere than we do close to the ground.

RivieraKid• 7 years ago

How does it convert signal strength to clearness of weather, I assume you have a map of base signal strength in clear weather? How accurate it is compared to a weather radar?

spaceheretostay6• 7 years ago

I should defer to the experts here: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8070024

The part I'm working on currently is a privacy-aware implementation of recording useful signal strength from user's phones, that could be used for this.

samstave• 7 years ago

Is there a map of Cell Strength Detectors all over? (actual devices, not a predictive map)?

I think that its really interesting that water is literally the reason why life exists on this planet. Basically, water has shielded life from radiation from space, (in addition to the magnetosphere, etc) -- but life was able to evolve in the protective layer of water.

So, I just find the fact that propagating radiation measurement through water, such as you describe, and as it relates to the potential health concerns of Humans creating a new, fairly powerful and ubiquitous source of radiation (5G) to be something we really need to pay attention to.

xenonite• 7 years ago

Wouldn't it be possible to reuse the 3G frequencies with an updated technology in order to obtain higher bandwidths?

OrgNet• 7 years ago

If it is possible, and those frequencies are worth using for this purpose, maybe they should give free 4G/5G-phones to anyone still on 3G to be able to do it as soon as possible.

mrweasel4• 7 years ago

It is. Denmark is allowing the phone companies to use their existing 2G/3G and 4G frequencies for 5G. The 700MHz spectrum is also being opened up for use with 5G.

I'm not sure if it will result in dramatically more bandwidth though.

jak92• 7 years ago

They are putting up "DAS" nodes all over my city. Nearly every block. Wonder if these will be hooked up with UHF 5G and what the ramifications may be.

roomey2• 7 years ago

I think the main point of 5g keeps getting missed when people are asking about cell phones and their broadband speed vs capacity etc etc. The only reason telcos are going to put in 5g is for IOT coverage. Low powered trickle data from billions of devices.

Stuff for your personal cellular use would never come close to covering the costs involved. And 4g will still be used for many years to come for that.

yaantc• 7 years ago

The focus today for 5G is fixed wireless access and smartphones, not IoT.

5G covers 3 variants: 1) massive broadband (with mmWave in particular); 2) URLLC - Ultra Reliable and Low Latency Communications; 3) massive IoT. The current focus is on (1). Lot's of talk on (2), but nothing much concrete yet. (3) is moving along, but it's actually based on... LTE.

Strictly speaking, 5G is a set of requirements defined by the ITU-T, not a technology. The actual technologies are developed by another organization, 3GPP. And there are 2 technologies to cover 5G: 1) NR, or "New Radio". This is what most people mean by 5G. It's for massive broadband and URLLC; 2) LTE (release 15 and later) for massive IoT!

Yes, the IoT variant of LTE (LTE-M and NB-IoT) will be the 5G implementations for a while. Eventually there will be new NR versions for IoT, but nobody is in a hurry there. LTE-M and NB-IoT evolutions will be just fine for a long time, as far as massive IoT is concerned.

When you hear about 5G deployment today, it really mean "NR" and not LTE based IoT. The concern for smartphone is really capacity during peak time in the busiest cells.

I work in the field BTW, as you may have guessed ;)

bdamm3• 7 years ago

I work in the mesh network IoT space, primarily Wi-SUN. Since we view NB-IoT and LTE-M as competition, I encourage you cellular guys to really take your time :) we're happy for the head start while we keep deploying our networks in the millions.

stefan_• 7 years ago

Isn't this fantastic? It is the measure of any great buzzword that it means something entirely different to every single person.

I personally think the entire mmWave part of 5G is at least another 10 years away. Like, that's just going nowhere. Massive bandwidth? Great, what for? WiFi will be mmWave before we have an application for that in cellular.

Presumably what is actually being deployed is the incremental LTE revision on the same old bands, some extra thrown in that were yoinked from other applications.

roomey2• 7 years ago

To be honest it's been well over a year since I've been in the telco space, and I was coming at it from a different angle (software).

My main exposure of the 5G area was the parts around the move to Network Function Virtualization. I wasn't deep in enough to know the ins and outs as you clearly do, I was extrapolating from what I know.

Here's my reasoning, feel free to poke holes.

Background: The hardware boxes used for network functions supplied by Nokia, siemens and the like were very expensive.

Telco profit margins have dropped massively as people make less regular calls and SMS, and use whatsapp and viber (over the top) instead.

The market is saturated.

A) Making data "Better" makes these over the top services better. If my data is more stable I will more likely make a call using whatsapp, and the telco looses the money from voice. - why would they do this?

B) 5G requires completely new infrastructure, from aerials to core packet switched. This costs a lot of money, again, why would they do this?

Reasoning: The ITU defined the whole NFV thing, and how to do it. You need a certified platform, cloud orchestrator, a whole load of systems to do NFV. The move to NFV is very similar to how x86 went from bare metal in the data center to hypervisors. It is an absolutely massive change. The telcos have never virtualised their machines, and can only start doing it now (in the last 2 years)

This is why the telcos took on/over openstack as a concern. I think they thought the could run openstack clouds and run their NFVs (this is what telcos call their VMs) for way less money than the hardware boxes.

Of course, reality came home, and rolling your own is hard. And the NFV providers still charged a fortune, and so did the system integrators.

So again, we are at a point that this costs a load of money for the telco. Why do it?

Benefit one is that they can now roll out new functions in a relatively short amount of time (magic of virtualisation and all that). And by short I mean I have seen a national VoLTE roll out in a few weeks.

And I though, that's great, but me, as a consumer, am I going to pay extra for VoLTE? Nah. 4G is good enough for me. And considering the cost to the telcos... something doesn't add up. As far as I can see, they simply can't add on enough consumer fluff to pay for what is a massive investment.

The only answer I can see, the only untapped market, is IOT. And my only example is some car company made a deal with some big US telco to do all of their car originating data, and I think that is where the telcos will make their money.

But again, I am coming from the software side. 5G to me isn't about radio or and of that, it is about telcos moving their compute to the edge, and virtualising their entire infrastructure to allow them to roll out new services in weeks instead of years. And I am at least a year out of date ;)

uncleberg• 7 years ago

No, most IoT devices in most applications are dramatically underpowered for 5G.

onion2k• 7 years ago

5G doesn't work well inside buildings without additional hardware. I doubt people will buy that for their house just so their toaster can display adverts.

blurbleblurble2• 7 years ago

[flagged]

autocorr2• 7 years ago

While 5G Will be a great boon, especially the beam-forming satellite version, another unintended consequence besides weather remote sensing is nuking the extremely important 24 GHz range (K Band) for radio astronomy. There are a few narrow protected windows for absolutely critical spectral lines, but the truth is that nature doesn't play by the spectrum allocations rules, and there are hundreds if not thousands of lines that are observed routinely outside of the protected bands. It is also remarkably free and clear of radio frequency interference (RFI), in part because industry has chosen other frequencies not attenuated by atmospheric water vapor. This isn't to say we should halt global human progress to save a local river bait fish, but that threat to forecasting is only one of the serious consequences major spectrum reallocation can have. This is especially true for passive use in the sciences, which has a weaker lobby than the private sector.

N_trglctc_joe5• 7 years ago

While 5G Will be a great boon

This is something I've been having trouble with.

Lately I've become more aware of the secondary effects of 5G- on weather forecasting, on the radio spectrum, possibly on bees- and it's got me wondering why we need it for telecom. I just don't see the value added. I can already communicate with anyone in the world, access any information, and find my way anywhere with 4G. A significantly higher rate of data transfer just doesn't seem to add any new functionality to my phone. Can anyone give me a good rationale for 5G? Entertainment doesn't count.

I'll grant right-off-the-bat that it'll have some fantastic industrial applications; my issue is with personal telecom. It just feels like a new planned obsolescence vector.

ashleyn• 7 years ago

Except entertainment does count according to customer use metrics.

JohnFen9• 7 years ago

I agree. I have yet to see any solid argument for 5G being a some sort of game-changer for the end user.

matchagaucho4• 7 years ago

Parkinson's Law. Increase in 5G bandwidth will be filled with next-gen media.

Cable boxes will be replaced by subsidized free smartphones in exchange for "always on" subscriptions. No more home WiFi for low-end market.

Personally, the industrial 5G IoT applications are far more interesting.

lemmsjid• 7 years ago

I am not saying the benefits outweigh the costs, but I think there's huge inroads to be made for high bandwidth communications tools like many-to-many video conferencing, which is tantalizingly close to being fast enough but still a pain in most situations I've encountered. Disclaimer: I am thoroughly ignorant about 4G and 5G so I don't know if 5g would help the typical issues that come up with video conferencing.

xkcd-sucks• 7 years ago

Modern economics is a religion of growth for its own sake?

BurningFrog2• 7 years ago

But entertainment does count for me and billions of others like me.

chiefalchemist2• 7 years ago

re: " I can already communicate with anyone in the world, "

Summing up some of the other comments: 5G isn't about (personal) communication per se. No more "accessing the cloud". With 5G we'll be wrapped in the cloud. Etc.

I'm not saying it's imperative we go there. Only that that's where we're headed. For better of worse. Like it or not.

Spooky23• 7 years ago

I think this is a great point, and that the main boon to 5G is the sprouting of lots of localized towers. It seems like a big giveaway to big telcos to the detriment of cable providers with bigger physical plants and capital needs.

End of the day, as shitty as Spectrum and Comcast are, they are a better devil then the AT&T corporate offspring.

prazgaitis• 7 years ago

Why do we need it? To send you ads quicker, of course

zjaffee• 7 years ago

Think for a moment about how big of an impact 4g had, and 3g before it. As others mentioned above about the law that states that any new computing resource will eventually get filled, there are plenty of areas where this is worthwhile.

The biggest first off would likely be the end of wifi as we know it, so in turn, an increasing number of IoT devices for the home/workplace/elsewhere would be built without the need for complicated wifi setup, and all syncing between devices would likely be done using a cellular setup. "Cable" would likely completely go away, where companies like Verizon realize they can deliver all TV over their 5g network. The constraints relating to numbers of devices on a wifi router will be backgrounded, ect.

Another key piece is that there will be far more nodes in a 5g deployment, so you could do better triangulation for GPS. It will have lower latency so even tighter real time applications can be done over the internet. This list can go on and on.

couchdive• 7 years ago

be sure to research and laugh at e-rating windows and the 5g range.

akhilcacharya• 7 years ago

The confusing thing for me (not exactly well versed in networks) is that currently all 5G base stations seem to have ranges more akin to modern WiFi endpoints than LTE with regard to how densely deployments will need to be placed - am I missing something?

northerdome• 7 years ago

To me the greatest boon is to rural areas. I am incredibly excited about the opportunity 5G opens up to those who currently live with marginal access to the Internet because the monopolistic world of ISPs has prevented fast, consistent internet outside of major cities and population centers. The opportunity for education and services to everyone is the major promise of 5G. Now I just sit here and hope that actually comes to pass.

mcv4• 7 years ago

I kinda agree. 4G feels "fast enough" to me, just like PCs have become pretty much "fast enough" about a decade ago.

I'd rather see more work put into usability than in even higher speeds.

benevol• 7 years ago

That's the crazy thing. Almost nobody asked for 5G. And certainly not our health. Their basically just stuffing this down our throats in the name of money.

There's an international petition [0] and one in Switzerland [1] that I know of - please sign if you agree.

[0] https://www.5gspaceappeal.org/

[1] https://www.change.org/p/p%C3%A9tition-contre-la-5g-et-ses-d...

grahamburger3• 7 years ago

It's so that we can make cable companies obsolete without running fiber everywhere. 4G networks just don't have the capacity to support use for TV streaming - the hope is that 5G will.

adreamingsoul• 7 years ago

I agree.

jopsen2• 7 years ago

possibly on bees

Citation needed, this seems like FUD.

nine_k2• 7 years ago

Entertainment doesn't count.

But it's what like 90% of users use their devices for! :-/

Sorry about that, but you (and me) are a minority.

arcticbull10• 7 years ago

I think it's driven by network utilization on the carrier side and battery life on the device manufacturer side. Your monthly 1GB (let's say) usage cap at EDGE speeds translates to around 5 hours of constant connection. At 4G speeds (40Mbps typical for me) that's just 3.41 minutes. If we can get that to 10X for 5G, that's just 20 seconds.

Over the last decade we've gone from using 5 hours of data per subscriber to less than 4 minutes, and potentially down to 20 seconds. Similarly, latency went from 400ms ping to 5ms.

This improves network performance, since the tower is more likely to be available when you need it, and faster too, even if the average throughput and backhaul link remains unchanged. It also improves battery life because the battery is primarily draining during active comm sessions. Get them in faster, serve them faster and back to sleep faster.

Think of it in terms of Apple's MacBook. The finite resource here is more complex as it's both thermal and power. The CPU tops out at an average of 1.3GHz but it has an instantaneous turbo-boost to 3.2GHz. You could say that 1.3GHz is pretty fast and gets the job done, if it represents the same TDP, why bother going faster? The answer is it improves your experience (lower latency on bursty workloads). It also improves your battery life because it's more efficient to spend 1/3 the time at 3.2GHz and 2/3 the time sleeping than the whole time at 1.3GHz. I think Apple described it as "racing to get back to sleep."

Obviously this breaks down with sustained workloads, though I'd argue the same is true of 5G.

jedieaston• 7 years ago

The main interesting part isn’t about making phones faster (although that’s a fantastic side effect since now it’ll be feasible to work off a cellular connection instead of having to find a good cable link for fast internet), it’s about everything else. Houses don’t necessarily have to have wired to the home fiber, instead, a 5G antenna on the side could easily get you gigabit.

closeparen• 7 years ago

Maintaining the existing level of service as more people use their phones more heavily at greater population densities.

As I understand it, 5G is more about network scalability than about improving end-user experience (though of course end-user experience falls off a cliff if the network reaches saturation).

ChrisRR• 7 years ago

Why does entertainment not count? Entertainment is the basis of our entire civilisation. If everyone were content then no-one would be striving to create better movies, cook better food, play sports, create higher definition TVs, increase processor power, communicate and travel across the world.

If we were all happy to sit on our own in silence, eating the same local crop day in, day out, then very little would be developed.

sandworm1013• 7 years ago

If 5G is going to impact radio astronomy then the governments that license the spectrum should fund alternatives. Some simple space-based telescopes orbiting out beyond the 5G bubble would be expensive but not terribly difficult (radio telescopes, not the JWST). Put a couple out beyond the moon and the next image of a black hole won't be so blurry.

brandmeyer2• 7 years ago

Large dishes and large networks of large dishes are economical on the ground in ways that are utterly impractical in space.

krastanov• 7 years ago

Radio telescopes are way bigger and heavier (large dishes required). Even more importantly, usually many radio telescopes are used together for interferometric observations. They require exquisite calibration of the distance between the telescopes, which can be pretty difficult in space.

mturmon• 7 years ago

In addition to the good points raised nearby: The data rate from radio telescopes is enormous.

TrueDuality4• 7 years ago

But it wouldn't collect the type of data that will be lost by the 5G spectrum. We can't change the microwave emission frequency of water but we can change our technology to not use a frequency close enough to cause interference with that frequency.

soneil• 7 years ago

I've always thought on the moon would be more interesting than "beyond" the moon. A ground-based dish on the dark side of the moon, isolated from a large majority of the noise we're pumping into space by the body of the moon itself.

kllrnohj3• 7 years ago

More like shouldn't the government have prevented 5G from licensing the spectrum in the first place?

watersb2• 7 years ago

We have already done a few low-Earth-orbit radio dishes for VLBI [0]. IIRC correlating the data from a single on-orbit dish was difficult because it was moving way faster, over larger distance, than the other elements of the array. Still learning how.

[0] https://tinyurl.com/google-search-vsop

idoescompooters2• 7 years ago

More info on impact of satellite constellations on radio astronomy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19712625

craftyguy• 7 years ago

As an amateur astronomer, I would greatly prefer preserving radio astronomy to allowing folks to have faster facebook crap streams on mobile devices.

BurningFrog2• 7 years ago

All things considered, I'm glad we don't live under an amateur astronomer dictatorship.

TeMPOraL3• 7 years ago

Radio astronomy has never had a better moment to push for its interest than now - just fire up the PR machine, and say: "Seen that black hole pic? Want more things like that? Better pics? Well, then let us keep our spectrum!"

airstrike2• 7 years ago

Sure, but what is important for me or you individually is not how we make decisions on policy affecting everyone collectively

noelsusman• 7 years ago

Area Man Prefers His Own Interests Over Interests of Others

tedunangst2• 7 years ago

Obvious solution: we designate one half of the planet as reserved for astronomy. The earth rotates, providing an opportunity to see everything. Then the people who want to look up can move to that half of the world, and the people who want to look down can move to their half.

davengh• 7 years ago

> save a local river bait fish

A few or more of those and we have real loss in biodiversity. Maybe your "local river" can sustain that for a bit - but overall they are all important.

woah• 7 years ago

What does 5g have to do with satellites? It’s a marketing push around some scheduled cellular equipment upgrades.

autocorr2• 7 years ago

They're probably not related, but I was thinking of the thing that SpaceX and another company are planning for satellite internet. I've heard that it would use the same centimeter wavelengths, probably for bandwidth reasons among others. I assumed that they were likely the same thing if they were both operating in the same frequency range.

dontbenebby• 7 years ago

Would it be possible to send up a space based telescope in those frequencies?

Maybe the economic benefit of 5G would be enough to justify a one time cost of a telescope launch, especially if US, EU, and Russia all pitch in.

watersb2• 7 years ago

autocorr, do you know if the Jansky VLA WIDAR correlator will be able to deal with 5G?

A primary design goal was terrestrial signal rejection; we would get nuked by ABQ Traffic Control radar etc.

I haven't kept up. I suppose I should find out.

cm2187• 7 years ago

Stupid question. I was under the impression that one of the limits of 5g was that it was a short-distance signal, easily blocked by a wall or any obstacle. Is it really going to create interferences all the way to space? I thought satellites measured the temperature of the top of the atmosphere, not of stuff on the ground.

lgeorget3• 7 years ago

They actually measure a lot of parameters, not only temperatures, and in all the layers of the atmosphere. And they're _very_ sensitive. For some forecast needs (short term forecast, storms, etc.), the conditions under the atmospheric boundary layer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_boundary_layer) is what matters most, so the microwave noise near the ground is definitely an issue.

pas8• 7 years ago

Typical signal transmission uses a a signal to noise floor of something like 20-40 dB ( https://documentation.meraki.com/MR/WiFi_Basics_and_Best_Pra... ) for high speed data transmission, but if you want to just get a big fat one or zero across, then you don't need that much. And antennas are really good at picking up resonant EM radiation, even if it's not the "full signal".

But these very sensitive weather sensors. And they already work by detecting a trend and then detecting a big blip over that. (So rain currently looks like some sort of interesting blip in the noise.) So, it might be possible to have cities mapped with a differing trend, but it would further complicate models. And currently over land there's not much noise, because humans don't use this part of the EM spectrum. Mostly because it's not great at long range, because attenuates very fast exactly due to water vapor in the air. So it was "easy" to exploit this for getting weather data, because it was reasonable to assume close to constant natural emissions. (Probably only a simple daily and seasonal trend. Though it might be already necessary to handle differences between woodlands and urban areas.)

(See also, why it's hard to do the same over water: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/252663726_The_Effec... )

Causality1• 7 years ago

This seems like a failure on the FCC's part. If it was going to be a problem these frequencies should never have been licensed out to cell companies.

ryanmarsh• 7 years ago

Slightly OT or meta. I keep bumping up against these nutty conspiracy theories about 5G being dangerous in various forums. Has anyone done a study of the effects of certain frequencies and energy levels on the human body that I can use to refute these fools? Also, what is the canonical source on 5g spectrum and power levels?

pas8• 7 years ago

https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1503/1503.05944.pdf this basically found that 90% of the energy is absorbed on/at/around the skin.

if neurons were directly exposed they would heat up and their firing rate would be altered significantly [look at fig2 / D ] ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4233276/ )

this study did a direct exposure testing on a human's arm (and on rats and monkeys) at 94GHz for 3s at 1W/cm^2: https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a628296.pdf

this did 24h low power 1mW/cm^2 exposure of human eye like cells and detected no significant difference in micronucleus expression, DNA strand breaks, and heat stress protein expression: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4997488/

this used 42GHz on rats for 30min/day for 3 days, and tried to look for tumors/cancer and found no significant difference: https://www.rrjournal.org/doi/abs/10.1667/RR3121

so. it seems there's no immediate and known adverse effect (other than the heating and maybe some interference with the electro-biochemistry of cells, particularly with neurons).

and luckily people usually don't use phones near their heads anymore (when doing large data transfers), so we don't really have to worry about concentrated absorption on the head due to being at best a centimeter from the emitter.

Also, what is the canonical source on 5g spectrum and power levels?

maximum permissible exposure is defined as 10W/m^2 power density (for 6GHz between 100GHz) by the FCC.

nilskidoo• 7 years ago

As if mainstreaming weaponized radiation poisoning weren't enough, let's unemploy weather-girls in the same swing. It's like Rod Serling took the brown acid.

pkghost• 7 years ago

Has anyone done a deep dive on 5g health concerns? E.g., 240-some scientists and 40 doctors signed a letter of discouragement (or something), claims research indicates 5g interacts with human biology in poorly understood ways: https://ehtrust.org/key-issues/cell-phoneswireless/5g-networ...

leroy_masochist• 7 years ago

Paging Dr. Allcome....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOovtZXYqj4

Dylan16807• 7 years ago

Some of those items on the list are sending up red flags to me. The weapon use is purely because it heats skin; if you apply a million times less energy for a million times as long, the danger level from heat is zero. When it can't penetrate skin, it does make sense to classify head skin exposure the same as foot skin exposure.

The thing about sweat glands is interesting. And sadly I have no idea how to evaluate the quality of the studies linked.

xxpor3• 7 years ago

It's all nonsense. The higher frequencies are non-ionizing and in common use today. See all of those microwave antennas on buildings and towers? A lot of them transmit around there.

Your neighbor can blast 24 ghz right at your house with a free licence:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1.2-centimeter_band

The reason microwaves (like from a microwave oven) are dangerous are because of their power levels. Like, they'd cook you if they leaked out. Not because of ionizing radiation.

throwaway9956695• 7 years ago

Non-ionizing radiation does have potential biological effects on Voltage-Gated Calcium Channels (VGCCs) which our cells have plenty of:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3780531/

lima3• 7 years ago

Like, they'd cook you if they leaked out.

Nope, they wouldn't. The standing wave would break down as soon as it left the enclosure. It would still be a potentially harmful amount of radiation, but not like that.

And no, 24 GHz is not in common use. It's used for special applications, mostly highly directional tower-to-tower links (I have one sitting on my roof for a high-bandwidth HAM radio link). With 5G, it will be ubiquitous in an unprecedented way. We've already seen plenty of interference with 5 GHz.

Of course, there's a lot of fearmongering whenever RF radiation is involved, but there are genuine safety concerns.

Source: HAM radio operator

blurbleblurble2• 7 years ago

Why is it that you can just dismiss the hesitancy of more than a hundred researchers with PhD's in a wide range of relevant disciplines who have made careers out of studying this kind of thing by simply posting a comment saying "it's all nonsense"?

https://emfscientist.org/index.php/emf-scientist-appeal

ctrl-f for "PhD" shows 126 results on the page.

Electromagnetic radiation is used as a signaling medium for countless lifeforms on earth, including the cells and microbes in our own bodies.

Imagine if some alien creature decided they wanted to flash relatively bright blue light across the entire surface planet, day and night at frequencies that known to induce epileptic seizures. It'd affect your quality of life and mine. For some people, it'd be devastating.

Just because we can't see it, doesn't mean it's not there.

I fail to see how a blanket dismissal of peoples concerns, however uninformed many of them may be, counts as "rational"!

cuonic• 7 years ago

See all of those microwave antennas on buildings and towers? A lot of them transmit around there.

But microwave links are P2P and directional, using narrow beams at a certain height so that humans (or other objects) don't get in the way. That will not be the case with 5G.

throwaway9956695• 7 years ago

Unfortunately, as a society I think we're going to have to "pee on the electric fence" for ourselves to find out.

Despite the fact that this spectrum has never been used for any widespread purpose, we're rolling it out and the burden is not on the implementers to prove that it is safe. It's basically on researchers to both prove, publicize, and convince society as a whole that 5G has health impacts.

I am not going to go all conspiracy-theory and say that the research is being suppressed but certainly funding for this research is not going to be a priority for the US government, as they've been thoroughly bought and paid for. Most research into health effects of non-ionizing radiation is not funded from the US government, so draw your own conclusions from that.

pas8• 7 years ago

The "good news" is that if it was serious, we would very likely already know. Therefore via some Bayesian inference we can claim that it's relatively harmless, but obviously worth keeping an eye on.

The bad news is that there are and will be entrenched interests that will likely try to "work around" any health concern, and maybe, potentially we will hear that the existence of 5G is worth it. (For example the tech advantage helps with healthcare more than the radiation harms us.)

codelitt• 7 years ago

Pilot here - they used the example of a hurricane, however, I think it would have a daily impact on thousands of flights (general aviation and commercial) which all rely on on accurate weather forecasting. Weather is no joke in aviation; even if you're flying a 747.

mattrp• 7 years ago

While most of the promise of 5g feels like overhype, this article has a bit of flat earth feel to it. For example, we’ve been trying to convert obsolete UHF frequencies to usable bandwidth for years only to find all sorts of reasons why it can’t be killed off. If 5g really threatened weather forecasting and radio astronomy I would think at minimum there would some sort of initiative to address it prior to a cutover - and yet, this article doesn’t seem to acknowledge such a thing exists so I’m left to conclude maybe the article is nothing more than a hypothetical what if that likely won’t have much impact in the real world. This is just my gut feel...

ReptileMan• 7 years ago

Why do we actually need 5g? Wired with last meter wifi is a lot better option imo for high bandwidth transfer

NicoJuicy5• 7 years ago

Human fallacy, we all want it faster and more.

Bur for 99% of the cases, why would we need it?

IoT doesn't need 5G, it needs LiRa.

Streaming applications, I can stream with 4G.

50 ms latency with 4G, so what. Except for competitive multiplayer gaming perhaps, I don't see the issue. But I think they want everything wired ;)

Industrial applications, outside of IoT? Give me a valid example that needs countrywide coverage.

I hardly notice difference with 4G and my WiFi. Increase coverage for 4G, before implementing 5G.

Fyi: 4G offers maximum real-world download speeds up to 60Mbps. Currently, that is more than enough.

cloakandswagger2• 7 years ago

Industrial applications, outside of IoT? Give me a valid example that needs countrywide coverage.

Police CAD systems, streaming video from body cameras, oil well monitoring.

Just because you can't imagine an application of 5G for your consumer needs doesn't mean it isn't needed.

pas8• 7 years ago

Oil well monitoring can work with the crappiest of GSM (a simple SMS every few minutes), no?

NicoJuicy5• 7 years ago

- Police CAD systems

Why would a CAD system need > 60 Mbps? Why would it even need more than 30 kbs? I doubt it would need more than a MQTT channel and an app.

- streaming video from body cameras

Low quality over 4G and store the video in HD. Syncing on secure access-points ( the devices need to charge, sync there) Nothing more is required, since body cams are used as evidence. Also, live stream body cams already exist over 4G ( 1920 x 1080, 30FPS)

- oil well monitoring

IoT... Jeez...

Just because you can't imagine an application of 5G for your consumer needs doesn't mean it isn't needed.

Like i said. You want more and faster. I already mentioned some applications, that also don't require it.

Just like your examples, also don't require it.

Again, human fallacy and you are providing excellent examples. Thanks.

newusertoday• 7 years ago

you still need more capacity, as the population grows more number of devices will compete for same 4g bandwidth and unlike optical fibre you cannot increase the bandwidth by adding new wire.

pas8• 7 years ago

Well, the FCC could coordinate a move to a new standard that uses smaller cells for the same 4G frequencies, after all big parts of 5G is about handling increased density.

NicoJuicy5• 7 years ago

5G needs way more capacity/stations than 4G

pas8• 7 years ago

What is LiRa?

NicoJuicy5• 7 years ago

LoRa, sorry

acchow• 7 years ago

tl;dr

We get Water vapour readings (which feed into our weather forecasting models) from the ~24ghz range which 5G is going to blast away.

keepmesmall• 7 years ago

Any assurances that this won't seriously disturb the earth's ecology and human health, or do we no longer bother with that when manipulating the whole planet?

joncrane• 7 years ago

Given the whole thing with Global Warming, I think this question already has an answer.

Reelin• 7 years ago

... a letter from NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine and Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross requesting that it be delayed. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai rejected the request ...

Ajit Pai strikes again!

ngcc_hk• 7 years ago

Seems striking especially topic not touched like radio astronomy.

seeker_• 7 years ago

Equally important but often overlooked concern is the risks it will pose to our health given 5G relies on much higher energy radio signals than 4G.

hutzlibu2• 7 years ago

I also do not really see the benefits of 5G.

I would be much more happy to have reliable 4G or 3G at least, first.

I suppose quite some support comes from people who have connection issues with weak 4G and assumes 5G will solve them.

But since 5G will consume apparently 3G towers and has much less range, quite the opposite could happen. Even less connection for people not in the city.

5G Is Likely to Put Weather Forecasting at Risk

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