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

https://www.wsj.com/articles/cities-are-saying-no-to-5g-citing-health-aestheticsand-fcc-bullying-11566619391?mod=rsswn

by sverige • 7 years ago

204 408 7 years ago

jchw5• 7 years ago

I’m ambivalent. Cellphone internet is already faster than cable internet for many people. Even if the 5g health risk is complete bunk, do we really need 5g?

Usually when I want internet that fast I want it at home or work. As such, I am a bit more excited for Wifi 6.

tehlike3• 7 years ago

It might unblock new products.

Being uneducated on 5g in particular, low latency fast internet can result in proliferation of mobile ar/ve devices, and bring internet to towns that otherwise dont have cable/fiber wiring, etc.

There are some efforts in robotics that would have much better ux if they had faster internet in remote places.

You can imagine stadia running on mobile on the extreme. Everything cloud streamed.

Faster internet means when it matters you wont have to wait downloading a large binary, even though you dont need to be utilizing it 100% of the billing cycle.

A mobile surgery center can be operated by a world renowned md, at the comfort of yheir home

jchw5• 7 years ago

It might unblock new products.
Being uneducated on 5g in particular, low latency fast internet can result in proliferation of mobile ar/ve devices.

If these new things rely on 5g, how well will they work as soon as they move out of range of 5g internet?

Bring internet to towns that otherwise dont have cable/fiber wiring, etc.
There are some efforts in robotics that would have much better ux if they had faster internet in remote places.

But wait. Doesn't 5g have more limited range than previous wireless generations? It seems existing LTE towers would be a better solution if you just wanted to cover the earth in high speed internet.

settsu• 7 years ago

Historically, “can” has rarely become “did” with regards to improvements in rural broadband internet access.

epmaybe• 7 years ago

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

merpnderp3• 7 years ago

At 5pm after work I get around 0kbps because everyone is leaving work and uploading selfies, starting music, playing a video or whatever. 5G would vastly improved the congestion problem so I could at least message I’ll be late as I’m stopping for milk, or I’ll be late as I’ve been in a wreck and am about to be airlifted.

Johnny555• 7 years ago

Are you sure 5G is the only answer, or could your telco invest in more 4G infrastructure? (which they are probably reluctant to do with 5G around the corner)

cookie_monsta• 7 years ago

I think imminent airlifting merits a phone call, even these days.

posixplz• 7 years ago

5G has nothing to do with the problem you’ve described — a symptom of insufficient tower backhaul. It’s typical for 4G LTE operators to deploy a minuscule 100Mbit fiber connection per tower. We should be investing in 1Gbit backhaul of LTE.A, but that’s not a sexy message for consumer TV ads.

The farce of 5G is that it’s a pure marketing ploy. It’s not driven by technical need.

DenisM7• 7 years ago

Competition to cable should improve speed and reduce internet prices.

Right now we only have cable in most of the country, when 5g is out we will have three more last-mike providers: ATT, Verizon, and T-Mobile.

ledauphin• 7 years ago

oh wait, two of those already are last mile providers in many parts of the country...

I'm not sure who exactly they're going to end up completing with.

jchw5• 7 years ago

Well, that it certainly isn't going to do unless wireless providers suddenly decide to stop capping data so tightly. I don't think wireless providers are cheaper today if you include things like that in the calculation.

Not to mention many people already use AT&T and Verizon for their home internet...

starsinspace• 7 years ago

Same here. I see all this marketing hype about 5G but I just don't know what I would do with it. Maybe I could some day get gigabit internet on my smartphone then... but what for? Streaming 8K video on the go? I fail to see any use case, at least for me.

xoa• 7 years ago

I'll admit I've quite understood this ambivalence about WAN links, and particularly not on tech sites. Consider: would you find no different on your LAN going back to 10Base-T, or being restricted exclusively to 802.11a-1999 for all networking (no wired at all) in a spectrum crowded environment, and thus with double-digit latency at all times? Or is gigabit or even higher actually useful in a variety of ways? How about for your persistent local memory speed, is SSD or even modern HDD of no benefit vs something on PATA or IDE or whatever from the 90s? I don't think I'm going out on a limb in saying that yes, having more bandwidth available has and continues to be quite valuable.

So then take that and remember that there is zero fundamental difference between LAN and WAN except latency based on distance and even that isn't that restrictive on Earth, particularly within a country. It's about 93 miles per millisecond RTT under ideal vacuum/air/photonic-bandgap fiber, or 70% of that in standard optical fiber, so 1/90 of a second say could easily be enough for a round trip to anything within a good 300-500 miles. And at a minimum, any application done on a LAN right now could apply directly. For a lot of the public for example thin-ish clients might actually make a great deal of sense for their "personal computer", just as it long has for businesses or certain home users right now, if only they had reliable high bandwidth connections. A lot of things that many people currently centralize could be decentralized again if it was ubiquitous that the population just WireGuard into their LAN from anywhere within a hundreds of miles or more and have an experience essentially the same as being on the LAN itself.

I mean yeah, we can imagine all sorts of future AR/VR applications or enhanced privacy via onion routing and the like (essentially being able to burn some spare bandwidth on it for the same experience as present) and the like too. But is it even necessary to imagine that far? We use LANs right now, and that for most people there is a dramatic split in their LAN/WAN experience isn't down to physics (most people aren't going more then 500-1000 miles away with great regularity).

com2kid2• 7 years ago

For a lot of the public for example thin-ish clients might actually make a great deal of sense for their "personal computer", just as it long has for businesses or certain home users right now, if only they had reliable high bandwidth connections.

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

Which is rather confusing given that modern machines can encode video at over 60fps....

Same OS to same OS is better, but not great. Every few years someone comes along and tries to deploy thin clients, and it never takes off en masse, good enough for a few limited scenarios though.

DenisM7• 7 years ago

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

supertrope2• 7 years ago

People notice short term tangible benefits.

We're not maximally rational actors. People follow the group, authority figures, the status quo, and fear what they don't understand. A Facebook post is read much more than a 30 page peer reviewed statistical study.

sascha_sl• 7 years ago

What is a statisical study?

saagarjha2• 7 years ago

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

artursapek3• 7 years ago

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

EdwardDiego3• 7 years ago

They're still present. I used to answer their phone calls when I worked for our government's radio spectrum regulator, and I would patiently explain to the caller freaking out about a new tower on the hill behind their town that a) the inverse square law is a thing and b) ionising vs. non-ionising radiation.

They generally chose not to believe me and stick with the "the government is going to give us all cancer because... ...money?" narrative, but I did change the occasional mind.

And yeah, all the people who freaked out about radio towers and electrical transmission lines are now freaking out about 5G. The best bit is how an article that stated "5G could interfere with weather radar" was converted by their hive-mind panic into "5G will change the weather!!!"

I wish I was making that up.

kube-system8• 7 years ago

Not to imply that you are, but I prefer to embrace nuance rather than neglect it myself by dismissing misunderstandings of it.

WiFi is a lot like a microwave, just with some important differences. WiFi is just modulated and about 1/1000th the power.

There are real reasons why SAR regulations exist.

I blame the misunderstanding squarely on journalists who picked up early stories about SAR limit studies and did an awful job of explaining them.

DenisM7• 7 years ago

By that logic a needle is a sword, a candle is a forest fire, and a cat is a lion. I question the value of drawing commonalities if this kind.

cyphar• 7 years ago

Microwaves operate using standing waves (that's what does the cooking). Wi-Fi doesn't.

People who say "WiFi is like a microwave" aren't trying to educate other people about the EM spectrum. They're trying to fearmonger by saying "WiFi is cooking you like a microwave".

stjohnswarts3• 7 years ago

This is the same thing. Tech bros on here supporting NIMBYism though is scary, didn't think that would happen on HN

asdff6• 7 years ago

Inevitable if their tech salary was spent on property. People let their spirit die for wealth.

zw1234564• 7 years ago

One thing that a lot of people do not understand is that 5G can operate in any frequency band. In fact, for many 4G radios it is nothing more than a software upgrade, no change to the physical device or power levels, just faster and lower throughput.

toxik• 7 years ago

_Lower_ throughput? Care to elaborate?

sipjca2• 7 years ago

I think he was referring to 4G having lower throughout.

Saying 4G->5G for most modems is just a software upgrade for most modems is not quite accurate. The RF hardware itself is generally not a full SDR. There are predefined RF paths tuned for the bands in 4G/5G. So it’s a little more than a software upgrade. Theoretically this is possible but I think companies like Qualcomm are too worried about pushing their new hardware instead of software. I do think it should move in this direction and it would benefit companies like Qualcomm to do this by selling software updates.

zb• 7 years ago

I expect it was meant to say "lower-latency throughput".

sschueller2• 7 years ago

The fact that the general public doesn't know this is a failure of the carriers and FCC. Instead of clearly stating what the differences are and maybe not putting everything in the 5G bucket they got greedy and thought they could get it all.

If the high frequency set was left out of 5Gs first round no one would have objected to the upgrade.

I find the "We need 5G so we can have real time translation and autonomous cars" one of the dumbest arguments that can be made and it's pandering to an uneducated public. Why do we need more speed and connectivity for those things when we have better and better ML processors on Teslas and Google moving some voice recognition algos directly to devices? It's a bullshit argument.

H8crilA2• 7 years ago

I suspect the clear presentation of facts on 5G would not have mattered. At all. In fact it could have had an opposite effect, merely by increasing visibility of the "topic".

rhacker• 7 years ago

Well, technically there may be a middle market for remote human controlled cars where a live video stream is necessary.

AJ007• 7 years ago

This title summarizes it - https://boingboing.net/2019/04/10/ai-8k-5g-ecosystem.html ; after falling back on their promise of building a TV factory in Wisconsin, Foxconn said the would be instead doing “AI 8k 5G” the online buzzword missing was blockchain.

EdwardDiego3• 7 years ago

If the high frequency set was left out of 5Gs first round no one would have objected to the upgrade.

There's a subset that will object to anything involving radio because it's electro-magnetic RADIATION and RADIATION causes cancer!

zw1234564• 7 years ago

one of the major reasons that so called mm-wave is far safer than previous low/ mid-band (i.e. < 6GHz) technologies is the following.mm-wave frequencies (e.g. 28Ghz) allow the use of array antennas (i.e. Phased Array Antennas, PAA's). The reason this is so much safer is because the PAA's produce "pencil width beams" that is, the beams are very narrow. Rather than blasting away in all directions like the sub-6Ghz bands, the beam is focused on the PAA antenna. Why is this safer? because, if something, like, let's say a human, comes in between the transmitter and the receiver, the signal will be completely lost. Hence, at this point the PAA controller will stop transmitting or scanning in that direction. So there is no radiation in that direction. So, if you are worried about it, just turn off mm-wave capability (e.g. turn off 5G UWB). But honestly, you don't have to worry, the beam (and energy) is very focused, if anything comes in the way, even a wet piece of paper, or a person, it stops. This means that mm-wave is far safer than previous 4G in the mid to low bands. 5G in the mid to low bands are basically the same as 4G but have a much more efficient use of the spectrum. So overall, 5G is faster, lower latency and safer than 4G or 3G or anything that came before. Of course there is a lot of misinformation from various propaganda sources that want to confuse the public.

zw1234564• 7 years ago

oops, I meant to saw lower latency and higher throughput.

amluto• 7 years ago

I find the argument that 5G is at all unsafe on a pole to be a bit silly. I think there are a couple of much more serious issues:

1. Is a millimeter-wave transmitter in a phone safe? The power output is moderately high, and these wavelengths are absorbed near the surface of your skin or your cornea. Cellphones are held near faces all the time. So I’d be much more concerned about using a 5G phone than about living near a 5G tower.

2. The 5G wavelengths May interfere with weather radar. I think that good weather forecasts are generally more important than cat videos.

stefan_• 7 years ago

No one is even putting millimeter-wave transmitters in phones right now.

But the more obvious point is that millimeter-wave 5G can only work with beamforming, and a beam that is going through your head where it is fully, entirely, fucking completely absorbed not a millimeter in, well, that's not going to yield a lot of throughput.

sipjca2• 7 years ago

Um... Yes they are. The Galaxy S10 5G has a mmW radio in it that’s transmits mmW waves for the uplink. The 5G spec also requires certain protection when the UE (phone) Tx wave might go through tissue. But you’re correct that it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to attempt to Tx/Rx on a beam pointed at your head since it will lead to drastically lower SNR

EdwardDiego3• 7 years ago

these wavelengths are absorbed near the surface of your skin or your cornea

And they'd cause a... slight heating effect. That's about it. So yeah, if you held your voice transmitting phone directly to your face for several decades, you might create enough tissue damage to up the cancer risk.

But then the radio engineers I used to work with climbed radio towers with microwave emitters putting out far far far more energy than a cellphone, and their only rule was "don't stick your head or crotch in front of a microwave transmitter as you're climbing up".

patient_zero• 7 years ago

The most important information in this piece is the FCC making rules favoring the very telecoms they are supposed to be regulating. Not that anyone familiar with this administration (or that scumbag Pai) is surprised.

superkuh2• 7 years ago

Yeah, specifically the sub-6GHz C-band that it is basically ripping out of the hands of traditional radio media companies (ie, npr, etc) that use it for satellite distribution of radio shows. There's been a lot of complaints from radio people about this but the telcos have more money so they'll get it.

lostmsu5• 7 years ago

Which also makes total sense to me: I use radio maybe once a year, mobile data once an hour.

wbl• 7 years ago

No the FCC made rules favoring the public's access to telecom services over NIMBYs. This has happened years ago for ham service.

stjohnswarts3• 7 years ago

I agree with you 100%, nice to see a sane response.

supertrope2• 7 years ago

5G is both a buzzword and moral panic. This is hilarious.

dane-pgp• 7 years ago

Imagine you are the leader of a country with a large military budget, strong central control over domestic media and policy, but little influence over global technical standards or device manufacturing.

Game theoretically, it would seem that a tempting strategy would be to spend money on influencing the debate in other countries to make them mistrustful of new technology, to slow their economy and relative growth. If the influence campaign isn't completely successful, then you get the additional benefit of having the populace divided amongst itself, and not trusting its own institutions, which further weakens their ability to work together and project power internationally.

Surprisingly, this strategy also works against old technology too. Imagine if you wanted to cause health crises in other countries by convincing enough of the population to be afraid of vaccines that herd immunity is lost. I know this sounds like its own conspiracy theory, but it would explain a lot about some of the weird fringe views that seem to be popular on the internet right now.

H8crilA2• 7 years ago

Fake news and unfounded beliefs are as old as humanity. Blood-letting, female hysteria, witch hunting, even the Y2K problem. People still read and believe the Bible, thousands of years later.

There's nothing new on this front.

reggieband2• 7 years ago

I know you're getting downvoted for this controversial insinuation ... but I must admit my mind went there while I was reading these comments. The amount of FUD in this comment section, especially at the top, is almost suspicious.

I get it that 5G doesn't exactly match the hype, that the cost of rollout is high, alternatives like improving 4G coverage and back-haul from towers are available, there are hints of problems with saturating the air in such high-powered/high-spectrum radiation etc. But how a group of supposedly tech savvy, future thinking, entrepreneurial types seem single-mindedly focused on the negative aspects of a technology seems to not match the normal crowd on hacker news.

5G isn't revolutionary but it is the exact kind of incremental improvement I expect to see in tech. It has some benefits (higher speeds, lower latency) and some drawbacks (proximity to towers, interference from large objects, cost to rollout). The discussion here seems to be entirely limited to maximizing the drawbacks and to limiting the benefits.

In my experience with tech, increasing speed and decreasing latency has always netted noticeable benefits. From CPUs, GPUs, memory access and network access - even small improvements in speed/latency have enabled major improvements in features. In addition, rolling out 5G is going to force the rollout of infrastructure enabling 5G, e.g. the fibre lines needed to supply all of those new base stations. For those reasons I am excited about 5G.

nerdponx3• 7 years ago

That's not what the top comments are saying, though. They're all saying "5G is overhyped and not worth the investment".

moomin• 7 years ago

This is what happens if a large number of people bear externalities and few get the benefits. Unsurprisingly, people block the changes. Countries that don’t slant the benefits directly towards the big providers don’t suffer from these problems. You can screw people over with regulatory capture, but it’s hard to hide that you did it.

m12k3• 7 years ago

It's my impression that the vanguard of the anti-vaxxer movement have long since moved on to 5G as their battleground of choice. And to be fair, of all the places they could try to incite another mindless panic, this is probably the most harmless they could have chosen - at least this time around no children will die from it.

api• 7 years ago

It's a shame that so much activism is spent on nonsense and even outright destructive nonsense. All that energy could be going toward improving things that matter.

Of course I think maybe what we are seeing is the activist arm of what I've heard called "conspiritainment." It's a way for people to LARP as activists at no real inconvenience to themselves. They get to feel self righteous at no real cost.

It also feels a bit like the domestic version of what I've heard Africans call "white savior tourism" where people from the West go to Africa to fill their Instagram with how they are saving the world.

Picking a real issue usually means confronting and speaking truth to power. That often has real life consequences. Attacking windmills (even literally! that is a thing too!) does not.

Edit: I once heard an investigative journalist and PI make this joke: "How can you tell if a conspiracy theorist is right?" "Check for their name in a missing persons database."

The_rationalist• 7 years ago

What you say is logically valid, why are you being downvoted?

mola• 7 years ago

I dunno, Anti vaxxers are definitely going against power. (Not to mean they are correct)

I think call conflating 'white saviour tourism's with this phenomena is missing the point.

We live in an age where basic trust in authority has eroded. The erosion is perfectly rational. We've seen large corporations manipulate the media in crazy Orwellian language. We've become accustomed to PR stooges going on media outlets and blurbing new speak and falsey truths .

This in tune with weaponizing of almost all form of discours, meaning we are almost always at a debate where our goal is to annihilate the other person ability to convince, rather than find common grounds. Have left us totally detached from truth. Not in a sense of total objective truth, but in the sense of common ground for discourse even though we don't agree on everything.

Anti vaxxers , anti 5g, flat earthers, regardless of the validity of their claim, are a symptom of this. 1. We can't blame them for not trusting authority, when authority is found lying again and again. 2. They formed a social construct where common ground , i.e. truth, finally exists.

I believe this is an epistemological crisis. Not just virtue signaling, or a weird form of entertainment

Spooky238• 7 years ago

This is a shitty issue, because you have the uncertainty of health claims, with extreme claims that may even be ginned up to discredit opposition.

My beef with 5G is the arguments for these disruptive rollouts are almost entirely bullshit. The United States is not in a race to drop a telephone pole with a short range antenna in front of my home.

In the name of national security, Verizon and AT&T essentially get to do whatever they want, with no third party input. The FCC mandates lower rates for pole rent and allows new poles to be placed anywhere. In my case, Verizon put a pole in my neighbors lawn about 12 feet from an existing pole.

Why does Verizon get a government subsidized ability to roll out infrastructure? Why doesn’t Spectrum or Comcast get it for their fiber and coax plant?

pas5• 7 years ago

Any pending suits against this FCC decision? Or against Verizon for that unnecessary pole placement?

microcolonel• 7 years ago

I still have no idea what practical application makes use of 5G.

XCSme2• 7 years ago

Playing the Chrome dino game as the connection will drop more frequently due to the smaller wavelength.

ripdog2• 7 years ago

5g has a low-frequency version which has comparable range and wall penetration to 4g.

vermontdevil• 7 years ago

My next door neighborhood is filled with the stupid 5G debates. The ignorance of some of my neighbors is breathtaking. And I live in a highly educated neighborhood. Go figure. At least the mayor and the council is on board for 5G rollout due to the current poor reception of 4G among some providers.

XCSme2• 7 years ago

Won't 5G have even worse reception due to the higher frequency/smaller reception distance?

kbrosnan• 7 years ago

With the current equipment and spectrum assigned it does have that problem.

MKBHD goes over this is a video. It is awesome if you stand right underneath a 5g site, 1-2 gbps. If you head down the road a hundred feet/30 meters the signal drops to much closer to 4g speeds.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_CTUs_2hq6Y

Wowfunhappy13• 7 years ago

Nilay Patel wrote an editorial over at The Verge titled "Wait, why the hell is the ‘race to 5G’ even a race?": https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/23/18637213/5g-race-us-leade...

All I’m asking is that the next time you hear a wireless industry person talk about the “race” to 5G, stop and ask them why it’s a race. Ask who the competitors are, and what happens if we come in second place. See if you buy the answer. I suspect you won’t hear anything convincing.

Faster internet is of course great in and of itself, but I'm not convinced it's deserving of public subsidies or regulatory exemptions, particularly in large cities that already have access to fast broadband. Furthermore, I'm quite concerned about NASA's warning that 5G will weaken our ability to forecast the weather, including life-or-death phenomena like hurricanes.

rolltiide• 7 years ago

yeah don't do this

nobody at the T-Mobile store knows anything

Its a fun thought exercise, but just smile and nod.

The whole point of going into a brick and mortar store is just to see how the improv troupe will lie to you this time.

Wowfunhappy13• 7 years ago

By "industry person", I don't think Nilay Patel was referring to standard retail workers. I read that sentence as targeted towards other journalists and professionals.

JumpCrisscross6• 7 years ago

I'm quite concerned about NASA's warning that 5G will weaken our ability to forecast the weather

NASA issued no such warning.

5G would interfere with one satellite-based moisture measure around populated areas. NOAA’s commentary was around how that one measure would need to be statistically tweaked or supplemented. (The headlines resulted from NOAA’s head warning the Congress that if the latter didn’t give him funding for these tweaks, our forecasts would become dramatically worse.)

Hurricanes, moreover, build over oceans. AT&T can’t keep a call in my Manhattan apartment; it’s going to be a while before 5G signals are making it to the middle of the Atlantic.

Wowfunhappy13• 7 years ago

I was repeating what I've read. When The Washington Post reported[1] about NOAA director Neil Jacobs's testimony before congress on the issue, they wrote:

With this reduced forecast skill, the European model would not have predicted 2012′s Superstorm Sandy hitting the Northeast coast several days in advance, Jacobs said. Instead, the model would have steered the storm out to sea. Lead time to prepare for the storm would have been cut short.

Was The Washington Post mistaken?

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/05/23/head-noaa-...

Dylan168074• 7 years ago

Also, worst case, we could just shut off that edge of the frequency allocation to leave a bigger gap.

kube-system8• 7 years ago

Ask who the competitors are, and what happens if we come in second place. See if you buy the answer. I suspect you won’t hear anything convincing.

That’s kind of a silly and easily-answered question by itself, especially for tech.

If you asked anyone with a minimal business background they’d have an easy answer for that: it’s a strategy leveraging first-mover advantage.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-mover_advantage

In tech, there are tons of historical instances of imperfect implementations gaining high market share because of first-mover advantage. It’s a really effective tech strategy. Switching costs, vendor lock-in, and technical debt are huge driving forces for this.

Wowfunhappy13• 7 years ago

This editorial was written within the context of countries. I understand why Verizon wants to get 5G before AT&T, but I don’t think the US should allocate public resources to help. If the result is that China gets 5G before the US, fine.

_bxg15• 7 years ago

There's such weird marketing zealotry behind 5G. They're acting like it's going to completely reshape society, but at best it's just... faster internet. In places where the internet is already pretty fast.

I can only assume it's a mixture of political and economic stakeholders that have their own reasons for really wanting it to succeed (looking competitive against China, selling new phones, etc.)

thekyle2• 7 years ago

I wish it was as easy to get people enthusiastic about other networking upgrades like IPv6.

saagarjha2• 7 years ago

Call it 6G IP.

np_tedious• 7 years ago

You can hear some particularly wild assertions like this in the long running commercial throughout the past few episodes of Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History podcast. They are formatted as conversation between Gladwell and an AT&T exec.

It always starts with "what are some things that might be enabled if bandwidth improved and latency decreased" and then just jumps immediately to some Internet of Things utopia.

dmix2• 7 years ago

I'd love to hear this, sounds cringey.

Edit: weird it's a 3 short episode advertisement thing, a "live-read" ad in an interview format. These Pop science people are a great marketing/hype vector. I'm curious how much AT&T paid for this.

https://youtu.be/EccF6jR3CFo

https://youtu.be/n5AWdU75c1w

https://youtu.be/UKaIg102CAU

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

It seems to have the same disconnect from the real world implementations that the AI sales hucksters are pushing, like those IBM Watson ads that were very obviously (to every programmer) being over sold to big businesses.

_bxg15• 7 years ago

Decreasing latency seems more like a material improvement, but I wasn't aware 5G impacted that. Our current peak of bandwidth, on the other hand, is pretty much as much as you could need for any given media.

Causality13• 7 years ago

Indeed. What's the point in being able to use up the 22GB data cap on my "unlimited" plan in five minutes instead of seventy minutes?

tzs4• 7 years ago

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

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

rhino369• 7 years ago

The reason their are low caps like 22GB is because LTE networks have limited bandwdith. These 5G networks will have 10X bandwidth.

Eventually, the carriers will increase bandwidth caps.

ma2rten• 7 years ago

This is remind me of when Trump gave a statement about 5G. He said something like "Right now we have 5G, which is great. Soon we will have 6G which will be even better."

asciident2• 7 years ago

Everything I've heard about it indicates that it's a trash technology. Unless you're standing next to an emitter, it's no faster than 4G and potentially even slower. Like you walk one block or behind a wall and it's not good anymore. So you gotta put one of these up on every block. I'm banking on it being a complete dud, like 3D televisions.

renaudg11• 7 years ago

Maybe you'll be interested to hear from actual 5G users before making uninformed claims. I have home wireless broadband in central London (no other good broadband offering in my street) and was upgraded from 4G to 5G last week. I went from an average of 5-10Mbps at peak times and 20Mbps max on 4G, to 150-250Mbps peak time and 350MBps max on 5G, on the same carrier (Three). Enough said.

apcragg5• 7 years ago

You have heard wrong - it's amusing that you're so confident in its failure despite having the wrong information.

There are two phases in the 5G NR standard. The first phase relies on some elements of the LTE control plane to coordinate data services. These data services use new numerologies for their OFDM modulation, vastly more flexible resource block, allocation, improved error control coding, lower maximum latency, better channel allocation, and standardized MIMO support - all of which will improve reliability and throughput, especially in crowded channel conditions.

Phase 2 formally introduces millimeter wave signaling - this is what does primarily propagates through line of sight (LOS) channels. Clever beam forming and beamsteering can alleviate this to an extent but these cells are intended for dense urban environments or interiors of large buildings. These will supplement the lower frequency bands when available but 5G NR devices will still use the lowband when mmWave is unavailable. Phase 2 also switches over to an entirely 5G NR backed control plane (Standalone, or 5G NR SA) which has its own reliability and throughput improvements though these will all happen in the lowband since mmWave isn't suited for these tasks.

JumpCrisscross6• 7 years ago

at best it's just... faster internet

Counterpoint: streaming audio and video were singularly enabled by faster internet. That is restructuring multibillion-dollar industries. The iPhone, one could argue, and through it real-time social media, are products of mobile internet.

There are legitimate new capabilities that will likely erupt from cheaper, faster mobile internet. If the playground is in Shenzhen versus Silicon Valley, that’s where resources should be allocated to explore that potential.

I’m not arguing for 5G. (I don’t know enough about it.) But “it’s just faster internet” is a facile counterargument.

clairity• 7 years ago

pervasive AR/VR is supposed to be the killer app for 5G, but i'm personally not excited about it (à la 3D TV).

just give me the lower prices we were promised by the carrier oligopoly in exchange for all those governmental concessions (not holding my breath).

jodrellblank4• 7 years ago

Counter counterpoint, humans have ears and eyes and already have streaming audio and video. Those things were clearly desirable and now possible.

What are the legitimate new capabilities you're thinking of, which many people desire, but can't have primarily because of (mobile) internet speeds?

reaperducer4• 7 years ago

Faster, yes. But "cheaper" is just marketing hype. There's no way the telecom companies are going to pass any potential savings on to any end user. Shareholders will poop a brick if they adopt technology that reduces RPU.

agumonkey• 7 years ago

I'm saddened that streaming is seen as something important.

5G may add IoT which can have value for everybody if done well (or not if it ends up as a sensation of being monitored 24/7 even without privacy issue)

liability15• 7 years ago

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

chvid4• 7 years ago

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

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

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

5G is a step on the way.

jorblumesea6• 7 years ago

It's pretty clear that the widespread adoption of faster mobile technologies has enabled technology companies like Facebook, Google, Youtube, Netflix etc to thrive. Investment in infrastructure has unforseen benefits that only seem obvious in hindsight. America basically "owned" the 4G world and reaped the benefits.

Not doing this for 5G will basically just hand hundreds of billions of dollars in jobs and growth to China.

_bxg15• 7 years ago

But what media is still constrained by bandwidth? There isn't really anything else. We already stream audio and video at pretty much the highest fidelity humans can perceive.

asdff6• 7 years ago

It's a real shame internet is controlled by telecoms

tus882• 7 years ago

But we already have fast mobile internet. If there was going to be this kind of buzz, it should have been for 4G. What makes 5G so game changing over that?

nitwit005• 7 years ago

Streaming, maps, voice to text, and most other technologies you can think of already existed before moving to phones. The bandwidth lead to mobile usage, but not the innovations themselves.

It's usually a huge hassle to get stuff working on a phone, especially if it requires hardware support. It's not the greatest platform for innovations.

tomp• 7 years ago

The issue is, there’s so many other things in the “faster internet” story than 5G that it really seems like a bit of a scam...

Personally, I’d much appreciate full-coverage, limitless, unthrottled, can-be-tethered, cross-border, always available (unlike in Central London) 4G. If mobile network operators can’t even achieve that, maybe they’re not up to the job of setting up 5G.

didibus2• 7 years ago

And honestly, they should start by improving home internet. It's already at the point where 4G is often more reliable.

thekyle2• 7 years ago

Oh man. If I could get unlimited 4G home internet and have multiple ISPs to choose from that would be the dream.

sambull• 7 years ago

Provides more throughput for mass surveillance systems, that will totally reshape society. Think 'social credit' systems. Servicing these customers will be the bread and butter.

dontbenebby• 7 years ago

There's such weird marketing zealotry behind 5G. They're acting like it's going to completely reshape society

It won't reshape society, but it could reshape geopolitics.

The US has had a unique position to monitor the internet thus far. With 5G that could shift (if large swathes of the world use Chinese hardware).

konschubert• 7 years ago

It’s basically a bunch of glorified WiFi hotspots.

Waterluvian• 7 years ago

My sense is that this is all completely driven by the need to have something new to sell.

HyperTalk2• 7 years ago

They want to be able to easily boil the organs of any target by simply typing coordinates in 3D space for multiple towers to focus their beams on. It's a weapon pretending to be a useful innocent technology so no one will protest its widespread deployment.

godelski9• 7 years ago

640 KB is all you'll ever need!

dustycowboy• 7 years ago

The bigger problem right now are the tiny data caps. Allowing users to use 1TB a month of 4G data would be a much bigger game changer.

mensetmanusman• 7 years ago

It’s faster by an order of magnitude.

As in all things, every order brings new changes distinguishable from the previous order.

tus882• 7 years ago

I get the feeling and have been asking the same thing. It wasn't like this for 4G.

Is it because it will replace wired internet as well? Or the ubiquitous nodes allow detailed location tracking? It will be managed by a skynet inspired AI? Or the fact China has taken the lead in implementing it?

Whatever the case it's a bit weird and I wonder what we don't know.

apexalpha• 7 years ago

I work at an ISP and even internally people are parotting this '5G will change the world'.

They said it about 4G as well, and sure, a lot became possible with mobile devices because of it. But all in all, it's just faster internet.

jnordwick3• 7 years ago

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

rayiner3• 7 years ago

Among other things, 5G holds the promise of making traditional wired telecom regulation obsolete, by getting rid of the last mile problem, reducing the tendency toward natural monopoly, and enabling competition.

hn_throwaway_992• 7 years ago

On a cautionary note, the past 25 years of technology have promised that they "enable competition" (anyone else remember the late 90s ethos of "anyone with a computer can publish on the web!"), yet here we are stuck with Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc. which are some of the largest monopolies in world history.

nilram• 7 years ago

I don’t see how it reduces competition since the technology requires even more bass stations then does 4G. More infrastructure equals more cost equals more investment required. Only the big players can afford this, and there’s only a few big players left.

dredmorbius2• 7 years ago

Technology which serves an amplification role almost always serves rather than breaks monopolies.

It may, on rare occasions, disrupt an existing monopoly. But only on the way to installing a new one.

hn_throwaway_992• 7 years ago

I definitely didn't understand anything about 5G being better at fixed locations, e.g. factories, where the comparison isn't really against 4G, but against wifi. What benefit does 5G have over the latest 802.11 spec?

avianlyric• 7 years ago

I can understand why “faster internet” is good or even great thing. We’re seeing all kinds of new streaming tech that can take advantage of more bandwidth.

Something that does confuse me though, is the way 5G is being touted as the solution to better home internet in the US. It only going to fast in cities, which are the perfect place for fibre or even wireless ISP using normal WiFi running point-to-point between buildings.

US poor home internet seems to be driven by lack of competition, 5G is one way of increasing competition. But surely trying to legislate local-loop unbundling (which is what happens in most of the world) would be a cheaper quicker way to drive competition?

Coming from the privileged position of living in a place with a cheap unlimited 1Gpbs home internet connection, it’s hard to see what 5G brings to the table, except perhaps a better mobile connection in train stations and concert arenas.

pas5• 7 years ago

Well, if 5G brings base station prices (and all the related equipment's) even further down, it could help poor communities.

But so far the problem seems to be simple density related. Laying/installing new cabling does not worth it in many places, because of the overhead costs. (The fixed costs.)

firecall• 7 years ago

In Australia I hear the parroted argument that our NBN effort was pointless because 5G will save us all :-/

antpls• 7 years ago

5G is designed to enable the Internet of Things, not just to improve speed and watch videos.

corodra9• 7 years ago

Reality is, it's also far more expensive to install 5g. It requires more fiber lines to run to more poles. Also, the telecom companies lobbied on state levels the max cities can charge for renting out putting stuff on poles. Plus trying to get cities to foot the bill. We are at the speed point of diminishing returns, 5g being said point. It's more money for not a real quality of life increase. I dont want my city to spend tax money on that.

nerdponx3• 7 years ago

It's more money for not a real quality of life increase. I dont want my city to spend tax money on that.

This is what it comes down to for me. We have housing crises, debt crises, infrastructure funding crises, and opiate crises all across the country. There are real and significant returns to investment on fixing those. Let's start there.

corodra9• 7 years ago

Agreed. Especially the opioid crisis. I think it's a "relatively easy" problem to solve. I'm totally for tax money to go to people who truly want to get cleaned up and put on the right path. I think that'll help a good chunk of people with a well funded program of the drugs that help kick the cravings and a work reentry system. Much better than having my municipality or county pay for 5g.

proverbialbunny5• 7 years ago

Do you think running more fiber to the last mile will give more people the opportunity to have gigabit fiber ran to their home?

Nasrudith• 7 years ago

The whole "aesthetics" thing against new technology always struck me as bizzare and selective given all of the far uglier things already in place that they actively like.

It seems to be the Oscar Wilde practically satirical "Anything which is of practical use is ugly and anything which isn't is beautiful".

mooselumps• 7 years ago

I don’t disagree with your sentiment but the 5G modem pictured on a pole in Atlanta looked like a mess with lots of exposed wires. I’ve never seen anything like that outside of a messy set up in a home office.

I’m fairly certain that the carriers could fit the antennas and wiring into a more clean looking packages to put on poles.

MrVitaliy• 7 years ago

This feels a lot like the battle of Blue-ray vs HD-dvd back in the early 2000s. While Blue-ray did win, it was less relevant to the industry than the original CD format. Things just moved online, flash storage and everyone got high-speed internet. If public WiFi becomes more ubiquitous, especially in densely populated areas, 4G vs 5G will be just as irrelevant as the battles for next CD format.

renaudg11• 7 years ago

Handover on public WiFi is generally horrible, the tech is simply not designed for that kind of use. I spend half of the day with WiFi turned off on my iPhone because it catches weak nearby signals even when they're simply not strong enough to work. iOS has "WiFi assist" which is supposed to be smart about that and fall back to a cell connection, but that simply never works in my experience.

asdff6• 7 years ago

Every disc video game is a blu ray, I'd chalk that up to a win.

didibus2• 7 years ago

Can someone with know how tell me if 5G is actually good tech? I feel like carriers just wanted to launch a new product called 5G, and just threw together some not that great tech behind it.

Is 5G actually innovative? Are we talking order of magnitude improvements over 4G?

Cause right now all I hear is that 5G achieves faster speeds and added throughput by simply putting more towers and access points around. That doesn't sound like innovative engineering. At that point, just wire fiber everywhere and create a giant Wifi mesh network with an access point at every house. Like that would give faster internet, but not very innovative.

Normally a good innovative tech would cost less, take up less resources, and achieve higher speeds and throughput. I'm not sure 5G is that from what I heard.

EDIT: Even if you downvote, I am asking a question that I'm interested in hearing answers for, so please still try and answer my questions. Thank you.

renaudg11• 7 years ago

Yes. Just got upgraded to 5G (from 4G) for my wireless home broadband, went from 5-10Mbps average and 20Mbps peak to 200Mbps average and 380Mbps peak.

It's at least as big a jump as 3G to 4G was.

The hype is real.

proverbialbunny5• 7 years ago

Is 5G actually innovative? Are we talking order of magnitude improvements over 4G?

5G theoretically is similar to when cable modems moved from DOCSIS 2 to DOCSIS 3. Docsis 2 ran over a single channel (a single frequency range) and if that channel filled up it could switch to another channel. Docsis 3.0 allowed modems to bond to multiple channels at once, significantly reducing the ability for the line to fill up, and giving people much greater speeds. This is when average speeds in the cable modem internet world went from 12mbps to 100mbps.

In a similar vain, 5G can span the entire frequency range (up to 96ghz I believe), so the closer someone is to a pole the higher their frequency range can span, reducing bandwidth on lower frequencies and providing higher speeds. Those who are far from the pole might be running 5g at the 4g frequency range, but because that will be only a few people far enough away, the bandwidth should be faster and more responsive, even on the 4g range.

People on this thread are saying things like, "The more people that adopt 5g the slower it will go." but as counter intuitive as it is, the more people who are on 5g the faster everyone's speeds will be.

All cell companies have to do is upgrade their existing 4G towers to 5G and over time everyone gets better internet, even if no more poles are laid out. Though, without more poles, the improvements could be mild.

PorterDuff• 7 years ago

Since I don't download uncompressed 4k video anymore, I'm personally getting practically all of the value of the internet (to me) from merely having a cheap cable connection at home. I've never been certain who 5g or fiber is really targeting. Amazon works fine, Netflix works fine, downloading an OS or language tool set isn't too heinous. High data speed to a phone is uninteresting, but YMMV. As usual, improvements become less useful on the margin.

The one use case I've run into might be robot cars, probably lower latency/higher bandwidth. I don't know enough about where the intelligence actually lives or how much in the way of inter-car communications is actually required though.

nitrogen• 7 years ago

Faster upload speeds enable new applications -- easier high res streaming, self-hosted storage (stream from home to your phone regardless of whether what you want is on a commercial streaming platform), just plain less waiting when creating and uploading creative work

richrichardsson• 7 years ago

Faster upload speeds is something that I wish was more prevalent. Most ISPs that I have experience of prioritise download speeds over upload, but for my use case there is a point where increased download speed doesn't give me any measurable benefit, but being able to upload at a decent rate would be a huge benefit.

supernova87a• 7 years ago

What I want to know is whether -- as technology is supposed to -- 5G will bring me cheaper and faster cellular internet for all its hype.

No? I'm just going to burn through my data faster, and pay more to the carrier? Why am I interested then?

Isn't more access and more affordable prices the goal of the FCC as well? Why do many other countries have so much better and reasonably priced data?

coliveira• 7 years ago

5G represents the end of the oligopoly maintained by Comcast and Verizon. There is a lot on stake for these giant companies, and the fight will be ugly. Chinese companies have a clear advantage in developing this technology because they have a huge country with new networks developing, free from the constraints of an established oligopoly.

renaudg11• 7 years ago

Really surprised to see the beating heart of tech that is HN turn into a luddite forum on this occasion.

Last week I got upgraded from 4G to 5G for home broadband here in London, UK. It just became commercially available in my area (on Three)

As I said in another comment, my average speeds went up from 5-10Mbps to 150-250Mbps and peak ones from 20-25Mbps to 350-400Mbps.

It absolutely is the game changer it's advertised to be in terms of enabling new real-world use cases.

Remember how video streaming was theoretically possible on 3G but totally shit in practice until 4G came along ? 5G is a similar kind of step up. You can expect an order magnitude more bandwidth on mobile than with 4G, and that matters.

In other words : the hype is real.

povertyworld• 7 years ago

Is data going to be cheaper too? Otherwise, it's not going to change anything for most people. It'll just mean I can blow through my monthly quota in a day instead of a week.

renaudg11• 7 years ago

This particular service doesn't have a quota, it's unlimited.

manmal• 7 years ago

My 4G connection in Austria has been able to do 120Mbps for years now, sometimes even 180Mbps. What you are seeing might simply be that you are mostly alone in your cell, and not really 5G related. Once more people have a 5G modem, things will get worse for you again.

creato• 7 years ago

By design, 5G uses many more and smaller antennas, so it solves exactly the problem you are pointing at.

davb• 7 years ago

I had a similar experience (also on Three) when 4G first rolled out. Blazing speed, low latency, low contention. Unfortunately as the technology became more mainstream, the speeds dropped and peak contention increased.

A small scale roll-out is absolutely not indicative of real-world performance.

In Glasgow, I'm getting around 5Mbps on Three over 4G. In Japan and South Korea I regularly got far in excess of 100Mbps over 4G.

It's more about backhaul bandwidth and capacity planning than radio technology. 4G is more capable than you'd think, and any speed real-world increase we see with 5G is almost certainly down to better network design.

Edit: autocorrect typo - "tech logo" to "technology"

renaudg11• 7 years ago

In the particular case of Three there's a simpler explanation and it means things will be very different this time : they completely lost the 4G spectrum auction war to competitors (EE and Vodafone mainly), but they didn't repeat that mistake with 5G : they're the only carrier with >100Mhz of spectrum and are likely to dominate performance comparisons for a while.

com2kid2• 7 years ago

Just ran a speed test, 55Mbps down, 5.5Mbps up.

An increase in upload speed would be a game changer.

That download speed can stream 4k w/o issue. The upload speed could use some improvements, I can imagine better scenarios if I could stream high res video off to a cloud AI processing system!

superkuh2• 7 years ago

Remember how video streaming was theoretically possible on 3G but totally shit in practice until 4G came along ? 5G is a similar kind of step up. You can expect an order magnitude more bandwidth on mobile than with 4G, and that matters.

5G-NR standard only gives a 15-20% gain in data thoroughput over the same bandwidth as compared to 4G LTE. The vast majority of the increase in thoroughput has to come from the millimeter wave bands. Think about streetlights to get an idea of coverage and propagation. Now think about running internet fiber to every streetlight. It's quite a task. It'll only be done (and has only been done so far in the USA) in areas that require high bits/khz/km^2 like entertainment stadiums and parts of the largest cities.

Additionally, almost no two countries actually have overlapping 5G bands. It's a mess of competing standards. So it'll be different frontend modules for controlling the antenna arrays required on the handsets (high power usage and space requirements) due to the integration required. Handsets are going to have to get bigger. Unlikably big and specific to region.

And beyond that the 5G setups being implemented now aren't stand alone. They're both LTE and Non-Standalone (NSA) 5G. The 5G just provides extra bandwidth and isn't used as a control for the handsets. It more than doubles the complexity of setups because of the trouble RF designers have to take with harmonics and intermodulation. All the competing national freq band standards mean different filtering solutions.

The future will not be evenly distributed.

smkellat• 7 years ago

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

tracer4201• 7 years ago

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

proverbialbunny5• 7 years ago

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

jorblumesea6• 7 years ago

One of the most important points that is missed about 5g is what 4G did for us. It's pretty clear that the widespread adoption of faster mobile technologies has enabled technology companies like Facebook, Google, Youtube, Netflix etc to thrive. Investment in infrastructure has unforseen benefits that only seem obvious in hindsight.

What will 5G bring us? Who knows. But if the past is any indication, it will benefit American companies if we invest in it. If not, all of that growth will go to China instead.

dubliner2077• 7 years ago

Drop my mind monthly bill and fuck 5g, I have all the speed I need and more than 64k RAM for my Phone.

tunesmith• 7 years ago

Regarding the health impact of cellular transmission, has anyone noticed that even the google search results for this are a total trash heap? I have a friend that turns off bluetooth transmission for all his devices every night, uses only a wired headphone for his phone, and even unplugs his wifi router every night. He's someone that doesn't know the difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation. I was tempted to make fun of him for all of this, but after searching on google and seeing what came up, I can't really blame him.

tzs4• 7 years ago

Some of the fear of 5G is driven by Russia. RT has run several segments about it. Here are some:

5G Wireless: A Dangerous 'Experiment on Humanity' [1]

Could 5G put more kids at risk for cancer? [2]

How To Survive Dangers of 5G [3]

Cancer risk? 5G wireless speeds could be dangerous [4]

‘Totally insane’: Telecomm Industry ignores 5G dangers [5]

According to the New York Times, citing a declassified U.S. intelligence report from early 2017, RT videos on YouTube average 1 million viewers per day, and that is the highest among news outlets. They also say that lots of blogs and websites are picking up RTs claims and repeating them, without mentioning where they came from.

Here's a Times story on this: "Your 5G Phone Won’t Hurt You. But Russia Wants You to Think Otherwise" [6]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_f9gpg4t6c

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpXEyP0WMrk

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aO1gZhwqCvI

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmLwuM0_MJg

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML7wx_5n2z8

[6] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/science/5g-phone-safety-h...

Joeri• 7 years ago

I’m reminded of the way the galactic empire in the foundation series descended into deliberate ignorance, with people actively turning their backs on technology, even while relying on it.

Anyone up for starting the church of 5G and sending out priests to install cell towers?

TwelveNights• 7 years ago

Nucleics gave the people so much more than what 5G gives to us. I would imagine that it would be very difficult to impress anyone with the advantages it brings, versus being able to levitate and emit light.

madengr• 7 years ago

Well, I do RF for a living, and have designed some mmWave transceivers. Time to grow a long beard and through on a robe. I just need a chair that levitates.

grahamburger• 7 years ago

This is basically my day job.

m12k3• 7 years ago

I can't see any way Russia benefits from the 5G hysteria directly. So I wonder if they use this as a way to screen for impressionable people in the West that they can then later use for spreading more 'useful' misinformation?

jorblumesea6• 7 years ago

Really? You can't see how Russia benefits from sowing disinformation and confusion about a possible next-gen technology? One that has the possibility of adding hundreds of billions of dollars and high skilled jobs to the US workforce?

cryptoz• 7 years ago

Russia benefits from all its disinformation projects directly each time the US is distracted or wastes time discussing Russia's talking points. That is one direct negative ongoing consequence from the 5G scare propaganda.

proverbialbunny5• 7 years ago

It's possible Russia is doing it to give China a leg up.

achievingApathy• 7 years ago

Isn't this also a facet of our "war" with the rest of the world to be at the forefront of technology? There are those that think ceding being the first in things like AI would be so detrimental to the US economy that we'd never recover.

rayiner3• 7 years ago

It’s very weird to see so many tech people siding with NIMBYs and hypochondriacs against technological advance.

This is just a microcosm if a larger problem: municipal governments hold back progress. Right now, my Maryland county is lobbying to get veto power over a much-needed expansion of bridge capacity between the western and eastern shores of the Chesapeake Bay. Folks are also lobbying hard to shut down already-built light rail stations in the county. Municipalities make it impossible to densify urban areas, demolish obsolete buildings, build transit, build fiber, etc. Remember when San Francisco used to stop fiber deployment because some people thought the fiber cabinets were ugly? 5G is just the latest in a long list of things where a minority of loud voices holds up progress for everyone.

Technologists are jealous of why places like Japan have such great infrastructure. They do because they don’t give local interests veto power over infrastructure. They don’t let environmental and historical preservation laws turn every attempt at infrastructure development into years to decades of litigation. Tokyo is criss-crossed with spiderwebs of fiber on utility poles. They don’t hold that up because some NIMBYs complained about the view. That’s how you make progress.

artursapek3• 7 years ago

I can't stand the term "NIMBY's". What does that really mean? Is "NIMBYism" actually that surprising? When someone settles down somewhere and invests in a home, they will complain if you come in and try to do something to worsen their environment. What else can you expect? Is being a NIMBY just the opposite of being a pushover?

jnordwick3• 7 years ago

Investing in a particular plot of land doesn't mean you get to veto everybody else's choices of what they do with their invested plot of land. Pure democracy violates individual freedoms.

You do you, and I'll do me.

wideasleep17• 7 years ago

Tokyo is criss-crossed with spiderwebs of fiber on utility poles. They don’t hold that up because some NIMBYs complained about the view. That’s how you make progress.

As a Marin county resident..you and I have a different view of progress.

DiseasedBadger• 7 years ago

I have heard suggestions, that the drive for 5g is to increases the density of wifi signals, since the technology developed for airport scanners can passively image people in areas of high wifi-signal density.

ranrotx• 7 years ago

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

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

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

stjohnswarts3• 7 years ago

It's just faster internet. They may have something with "aesthetics" but that smells of NIMBYism which is driven by rich locals when 75% of the populace has no problem with it. There are no health risks either, that is just the imagination of people who follow Alex Jones or who believe in crystal energy. The FCC needs to bully them.

Rustty2• 7 years ago

I've been reading by through comments and I see only one mention of hazard to physical and/or mental health. That one mention is "EM bullshit". Could I kindly ask for anyone to point me to a site/s that make you believe there is no potential harm to humans from 5G? Thank you in advance :)

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

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