Wireless Industry Now Claims 5G Will Miraculously Help Fix Climate Change
from the is-there-nothing-it-can't-do dept
For several years the wireless industry has been hyping fifth-generation wireless (5G) as something utterly transformative. For this whole stretch we've been subjected to claims about how the wireless standard would revolutionize smart cities, transform the way we live, result in unbridled innovation, and even help us cure cancer (doctors have told me it won't actually do that, if you're interested).
But in reality, when 5G arrived, it was a bit underwhelming. At least in the United States, where speeds were dramatically lower than overseas deployments due to our failure to make middle-band spectrum widely available. And at prices that remain some of the highest in the developed world thanks in large part to consistent consolidation and regulatory capture.
Yeah, 5G is important. But not in any sexy way. It provides significantly faster speeds and lower latency over more reliable networks. Which is a good thing. But it's more evolution than revolution. Consumers are generally happy with 4G speeds, and most consumer surveys suggest the number one thing they want is better coverage (which U.S. 5G has struggled to provide because middle band spectrum was scarce) and price cuts.
Hoping to excite consumers and regulators, wireless carriers have been desperate to come up with marketing that tries to frame 5G as utterly transformative. Usually this involves marketing that takes something you can already do over 4G or Wi-Fi, attaching 5G to it, and calling it a miracle. Like watching concerts (which you can already do) over 5G. Or getting a tattoo remotely (which you could technically already do over wired, Wi-Fi, or 4G broadband):
While 5G hype had slowed a bit in the last six months, the wireless industry jumped back into the fray with a sponsored report claiming that 5G will soon dramatically aid the fight against climate change. The industry study (which was quickly picked up and parroted by loyal telecom trade magazines) insists that 5G will quickly help the U.S. meet its climate goals (which most climate experts say were already woefully undercooked):
"In the United States, use cases on 5G networks are expected to enable the abatement of 330.8 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents (MMtCO2e) across five industry verticals by 2025, which is an approximated 20% contribution towards US emission reduction targets at this time. This is the same effect as taking 71.9 million cars off the roads for one year or eliminating the annual emissions from 83 coal-fired power plants."
The report effectively goes on to argue that the very act of embedding faster, lower-latency 5G chipsets into technology in fields and factories will improve overall efficiency and communication speed. Which is true, but the idea that you could actually take these improvements and measure their impact on overall emissions across a parade of different technologies and industries seems suspect at best. And even if you could, the idea that companies will exploit these efficiencies to reduce carbon emissions--as opposed to simply utilizing these improved efficiencies to improve profitability--seems like a fairly sizeable and generous assumption.
The whole report is based on the concept that being faster and more energy efficient will just naturally lead to lower carbon emissions, through very "science-ish" sounding paragraphs like this one:
"5G can reduce carbon emissions through a more efficient use of energy per bit of data transmitted. We call this an “upstream” effect because of technical efficiency gains realized by the network itself. In addition to the upstream effect, widespread 5G adoption will bring a positive effect “downstream,” or changes that result from behavior changes stemming from technologies enabled by 5G’s higher speed or device throughput."
But just because you've affixed faster, lower latency chipsets onto hardware in a factory or field doesn't naturally always equate to greater efficiency, either. The underlying equipment being used could still be inefficient, polluting, and problematic. And any gains in efficiency could still be offset by just a countless array of other factors at the company, be it dysfunctional organization or dated equipment. Like with most claims, 5G isn't just some kind of magic lotion you spread on things resulting in everything somehow getting better.
The wireless industry certainly wants the public to believe 5G is magic to justify U.S. consumers paying some of the highest prices for wireless service in the developed world. But the hype serves another purpose: if you portray 5G as a near-mystical to the majority of societal problems, that increases the pressure on regulators to acquiesce to industry demands quickly and without much thought. If they don't (like say by questioning the need for more subsidies, blocking a problematic megamerger, or supporting basic consumer protections), they're enemies of progress and innovation.
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Filed Under: 5g, climate change, exaggerations, overhype, overselling
Companies: ctia
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i'll believe once the aero industryactually admits that neither 5g nor any other g system is gonna bring down every plane that enters USA air space, behaving the same as it does in the airspace of every other country that has already deployed it successfully!!
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The human commands of the tattoo artist, are what 1% of 4G bandwidth? will now be only .1% of 5G bandwidth? The human is the bottleneck, not the tattoo machine or radio chipsets.
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How can it possibly fix climate change, which is just another conspiracy by the elite?
/s
Also - even if the tech does work as advertised, doesn't having a better, faster tool usually lead to new use cases and an overall increase?
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Trendy
Perhaps they could affix some "No MSGs" or "Aspartame Free" labels on it next.
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oh NO! But,..
can 5G help against those monstrous Epic x4^^^ Dust Bunnies under the bed so many were taught to fear?!!?
might as well huh?
5G radio frequencies can probably also walk your dog, grab their--solid lawn deposits, remove cookies from your browser, filter your coffee grounds, and ...
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Re:
But, freaking out about it reduces the number of flights and helps with climate change!
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What behavior would change?
People aren't automatically going to use their 5G devices less simply because they can do the same amount of work as before in (slightly!) less time. Some will, but some will use their devices for just about the same amount of time.
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Re:
Good argument other than the fact that other countries 5G frequencies are different than what the USA is using.
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Re:
We had a replacement in the works, but it was discontinued after it was discovered that it wasn't cost effective compared to the model it was replacing.
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Extrapolation is a wonderful thing. It always seems to show you just what you want it to.
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5G likely to mess with weather forecasts, but FCC auctions spectrum anyway
FCC auctions 24GHz spectrum despite likely interference with weather satellites.
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Well, it could help....
If done properly, so I don't have to commute in my car or otherwise haul my body to the right place anymore....that would make a dent in global warming.
To do that, it needs to be secure, and the backbone that feeds it also secure.
But right now it looks a lot like a big silicon hog...sending perfectly good 4g hardware to landfills...
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buy walkie talkie india
if you want to buy walkie talkie please check here talkpro.in
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It slices, it dices, it whops, it chops!
I await the ever present advertisements that will, inevitably, claim that 5G can cure impotence, E.D. and hair loss. They can't. They never could. They are lying to you to sell you something that doesn't work.
Now, 6G, that can . . .
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Re: Well, it could help....
If you get unlimited data when tethering, which as far as I know no US carrier is offering.
I'll be open to the possibility of 5G helping with climate change as soon as they can prove that 3G and 4G did.
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Re: Re: Well, it could help....
common folk are not responsible for climate change. big tech is. the biggest 100 corpos are like 80% of it all and they sucked personal carbon footprints out of their butt to distract from the real issue, which is them.
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Re: Re: Re: Well, it could help....
What do you mean by "big tech"? Because most people are talking about Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc. Not that they have zero responsibility for climate change, but Big Oil is obviously much more of an issue.
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Hang in there
As someone who is sitting here on 5GUC and has seen the numbers in real life,
5G will, eventually, change mobile internet.
5G stands to be the equivalent of going from dialup to cable. Cable to fibre.
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