5G - health hazard?

skallywag wrote: »

This old chestnut always seems to come around any time a new wireless technology launches.

In summary health concerns tend to be associated with the Output Power of the Transmitter, and not the frequency used itself. The frequency of the waves is related to the maximum distance that can be reached.

By way of example a 2G GSM Transmitter operating at 900Mhz will have roughly double the range of a 3G Transmitter working at 2.1Ghz, which in effect means that you need many more base stations for 3G rather than 2G at 900 Mhz. This assumes that both transmitters are using the same Output Power.

The good news about Output Power though is that it's effect obeys the square law, i.e. if you move from a distance of 1m to a distance of 2m from the Transmitter, then the power drops by a factor of 4.

In summary, unless you are spending large amounts of time at very close distances to the transmitter (i.e. base station, not handset), then there is no concern. This goes for any radio transmitter, and is not specific to 3G, 4G, 5G, etc.

One point to note is that the networks have a strong preference for lower frequencies, based on their poor experience with 2100MHz for 3G, which generally resulted in bad urban indoor coverage and issues in rural areas. 3G was ultimately extended into 900MHz (the original 2G GSM space) which is the main reason most of us have noticed a big improvement in 3G coverage in recent years.

With 4G there were two allocations 1800MHz (the secondary 2G band) and 800MHz which was originally allocated to the upper end of UHF television and has been cleared by the introduction of Digital TV.

800MHz 4G works extremely well in terms of propagation and allows for fewer, lower power transmitters and actually should give your handset better battery life too as it's able to reach the towers more easily.

With 5G, the dominant frequency will be 700MHz which is going yet lower again into the old UHF TV spectrum.

They're also allocating 3.6GHz but that's likely to be used for rural broadband type fixed wireless. There are already services using similarly high frequencies for that kind of use and also MMDS used those bands for decades without issue.

People really need to start questioning this kind of 'OMG it will microwave us in our beds" nonsense. These are totally benign, harmless technologies and they're of huge benefit to getting broadband services into places that are unreachable by anything else.

Blocking 5G and 4G in rural Ireland will basically kill off the possibility of people living and working in remote areas.

Incidentally, this is nothing new, back in the rural electrification days you'd people freaking out about the dangers of electricity and wouldn't have it in the house in case it would somehow 'get them'.

In terms of cancer risks, you also need to get your priorities right:

In Irish context the biggest ones that you can control are:

1. Self inflicted: Lifestyle choices you're making around smoking, alcohol, food and exercise.

2. Environmental: smoke (including form those quaint and lovely rural solid fuel fires we think are so harmless), air pollution which in Ireland is largely from transportation - particularly things like invisible micro-particles from diesel and then the vast array of household chemicals and cosmetics we slather ourselves in and so on.

3. Radon gas: It's very important to ensure you're aware of it if it's an issue and also insure that your home's properly ventilated and that the risks are managed and mitigated. This is a really serious real risk, yet most people don't give a damn about it and spend all their time worrying about nonsense like 5G and ESB wires that have no proven risk of cancer whatsoever, yet radon gas in your home is very significantly proven to be a cause of lung cancer.

4. Get yourself vaccinated against HPV! That's a very serious one and you can massively reduce your risk of various cancers.

Deleted User wrote: »

Nothing to fear it's not even real 5G is it? From listening to the speeds Imagine are advertising sounds like the same stunt At&T are pulling in the US.

Yes, this is real 5G. You can't market LTE Advanced as 5G in Europe.
LTE Advanced is already on the air in Ireland as 4G+ usually

Wanderer78 wrote: »

Had an anti-5ger trying to convince me that masts are required every couple of hundred meters, in order for the network to work, I suspect this isn't true, can't imagine that setup to be to viable for most providers?

Not quite no.

The main change is you've masts that use different technology and can also do things like directionally transmit towards devices that are actually in use rather than just radiating signals all over the place. For the very localised, small sites, you're looking at transmitters that aren't a whole lot more powerful than a couple of mobile phones themselves in the case of some of those picocells. It's more like just adding little sites that are akin to Wi-Fi nodes.

They will hang 5G (and 4G) off more direct fibre connectivity to masts and use more small, very low powered sites. This is already done for existing technologies and it actually reduces, not increases radio signal strengths used.

You already have a situation where if you want to get decent speeds and coverage in densely populated areas, you add very small cells, often in Ireland they're on buildings, that provide that kind of dense cover.

A lot of 5G tech is about the backhaul - more fibre connectivity to the sites etc. So you'll see more of a convergence between existing fibre rollout for stuff like FTTH and FTTC and providing connectivity for small 5G sites.

In rural areas, it certainly would not be viable to have masts every few hundred meters - you're really just looking at a further evolution of existing technologies with a lot of branding.