Claims Of 5G Health Risks Are Frequently Based On A Single, 20 Year Old Flawed Graph

from the ill-communication dept

If you've spent any time on Twitter, you've probably seen a rising tide of folks expressing worry about the health impact of 5G.

To be clear, the widespread, long term impact 5G (especially millimeter wave) will have on human health hasn't been adequately studied yet, which makes absolutist claims on either side of this argument shaky from the start. As such, a lot of the recent health concerns being spread about 5G aren't based much on actual science, if they rely on actual science at all. Numerous news outlets (like RT) have similarly proclaimed that 5G will "kill you," without providing much in the way of hard evidence. Their recent segment on the "5G apocalypse" is just one of several the outlet has been running over the last few years or so:

This week however, the New York Times penned a report noting that one of the key bits of "evidence" used by those insisting 5G will be harmful wound up not being evidence at all. Since 2000, those professing that wireless signals can cause brain cancer have relied on a chart by physicist Bill P. Curry, proclaiming to show that tissue damage increases with the rising frequency of radio waves:

Curry's data was widely used to justify removing wireless communications from many schools, reposted repeatedly online by purported health experts, and even laid the foundation for several lawsuits alleging negative wireless health impacts. It wound up as the foundation for other, broader, but equally shaky theories. The only problem: it was never true. The graph failed to acknowledge that human skin tends to block higher frequencies, making the entire chart inaccurate:

"It doesn’t penetrate,” said Christopher M. Collins, a professor of radiology at New York University who studies the effect of high-frequency electromagnetic waves on humans. Dr. Curry’s graph, he added, failed to take into account “the shielding effect.” You Make the Call: ‘Moving Forward With the American Dream’ in New Jersey Dr. Marvin C. Ziskin, an emeritus professor of medical physics at Temple University School of Medicine, agreed. For decades, Dr. Ziskin explored whether such high frequencies could sow illness. Many experiments, he said, support the safety of high-frequency waves."

Having reported on this subject a few times, I will say that this is a seedier, deeper rabbit hole than you might think. While Russian news outlets do seem to be enjoying amplifying fear on this subject, there's plenty of home grown folks pushing 5G health risk claims as well. I've found a long line of academics happy to go on the record claiming 5G could pose a health risk. I've also found plenty of others proclaiming any health concerns are fluff and nonsense. But pretty uniformly you'll find one consensus buried under the mess: far, far more study is necessary before anybody engages in absolutism one way or the other.

Filed Under: 5g, bill curry, fearmongering, health risks, radiation, research, studies, wireless

5G's Latest Problem: Summer Temps Are Causing 5G Phones To Overheat

from the this-is-all-going-really-well dept

Buried underneath the blistering hype surrounding fifth-generation (5G) wireless is a quiet but growing consensus: the technology is being over-hyped, and early incarnations were rushed to market in a way that prioritized marketing over substance. That's not to say that 5G won't be a good thing when it arrives at scale several years from now, but early offerings have been almost comical in their shortcomings. AT&T has repeatedly lied about 5G availability by pretending its 4G network is 5G. Verizon's falsely telling everyone 5G will help cure cancer, but its actual deployments have been spotty and expensive.

5G device support barely exists. Apple is in no rush to get its first phones to market. The promise of 5G as a competitive and rural coverage panacea has been vastly overstated. And most surveys suggest US consumers (who already pay some of the highest data prices in the developed world) are more interested in lower bills than faster speeds. All of which is to say that 5G isn't quite the Earth-shattering revolution it has been heralded as by carriers and network vendors eager to sell more cell phones and network hardware.

There's another wrinkle being noticed by some of the folks putting these networks through their paces. Qualcomm's first generation 5G modem chipsets appear prone to overheating in summer temps, something oddly missing from the industry's marketing hype. It's a problem that's plaguing numerous carriers, according to Sascha Segan and PCMag:

"On a hot Las Vegas morning, my two Galaxy S10 5G phones kept overheating and dropping to 4G. This behavior is happening with all of the millimeter-wave, first-generation, Qualcomm X50-based phones when temperatures hit or exceed 85 degrees. We saw it with T-Mobile in New York, with Verizon in Providence, and now with AT&T in Las Vegas. It's happened on Samsung and LG phones, with Samsung, Ericsson, and Nokia network hardware."

Current 4G LTE smartphones integrate everything into one chip. Early 5G chipsets require numerous chips including a chip for the 5G mmWave modem and the mmWave antenna modules. As a result, current 5G chipsets take up a lot more room and generate notably more heat than their 4G equivalent. And while better chips are expected to arrive in time, it's another example of how early 5G adoption isn't really worth it, especially given this connectivity is being priced at a steep premium over already costly 4G LTE plans.

Again, faster, more reliable networks are always a good thing, and in time 5G will be an important natural evolution, whenever it's fully cooked and widely available. But the absurd hype we've been subjected to up to this point (5G will cure cancer! 5G will result in four day work weeks!) is actually undermining the technology. Instead of showing consumers why 5G is important, carriers and hardware vendors rushed 5G tech to market, overstated what it can do, and misrepresented where it's available, leaving consumers with the distinct impression 5G is largely just undercooked bullshit.

Filed Under: 5g, hype, overheating

NASA, NOAA, and the Navy Tell The FCC Its 5G Plan Will Harm Weather Forecasting

from the ill-communication dept

The Ajit Pai FCC has pissed off yet another subset of the population still reliant on factual data.

Scientists and researchers at NASA, NOAA, and the American Meteorological Society (AMS) have been warning that the wireless industry's use of select bands for 5G could interfere with transmissions of weather-satellite imagery. In a letter (pdf) sent to the FCC last month, warning that the industry's plan to use 24GHz band could severely hamper weather forecasting. The FCC recently auctioned off spectrum in this band for private companies, but a growing roster of scientists say precautions weren't taken first:

"NOAA and NASA have conducted studies that show interference in passive collection at the 23.6-24 GHz band from the adjacent 5G band (24.25 GHz); as such it is expected that interference will result in a partial-to-complete loss of remotely sensed water-vapor measurements. It is also expected that impacts will be concentrated in urban areas of the United States first."

More plainly, water vapor emits radiation at 23.8GHz. Both the NOAA and NASA say monitoring these vapors won't be possible if the neighboring band is too noisy. Things like hurricane forecasts, they say, could take up to two to three days longer if adequate protections aren't put in place. There's far more detail in this recent article in Nature, where academics note that while far more scientific study is needed, the interference potential here is a very real threat.

AT&T and other industry players recently gobbled up spectrum in the band at auction, and have an obvious vested interest in getting the spectrum in place quickly as they look to cash in on fifth generation wireless (5G). This being Ajit Pai, his response to the concerns has been to tell the NOAA, NASA, Navy, and AMS that they don't know what they're talking about. Senators have since pressed Pai to provide insight into exactly what his agency did to mitigate the potential harm:

"Explain and provide supporting documentation related to the FCC's public interest analysis, including any cost-benefit analysis, on the FCC's emissions limit. In particular, explain how the FCC addressed the costs to taxpayers from the loss of billions of dollars of investment in weather-sensing satellites, the costs to public safety and national security, and to the nation's commercial activities that rely on this critical weather data."

As if on cue, representatives of the "American Consumer Institute" (a non-profit pretending to be a consumer advocacy firm but actually backed by big telecom companies) has been pushing editorials trying to claim the problem doesn't actually exist either, and that the Navy, AMS, NASA, and NOAA are all somehow suffering from some form of scientific delusion. Meanwhile a separate but similar controversy has emerged over the FCC's plan for the 1675-1680MHz band. There too the American Geophysical Union (AGU), American Meteorological Society (AMS), Boeing, Accuweather, and National Weather Association (NWA) have all been warning the FCC that its spectrum sharing plan for that band could also cause forecasting problems.

It's yet another example of the discord created when you have a regulatory agency driven by ideology, alternative facts, and a blind fealty to big companies involved in overseeing issues that require nuance, objectivity, and at least a fleeting regard for science and data.

Filed Under: 5g, ams, fcc, interference, nasa, noaa, weather forecasting

The Press Needs An Intervention When It Comes To Over-Hyping 5G

from the words-are-but-wind dept

By now we've made it very clear that while fifth generation wireless (5G) is good, it's being painfully over-hyped. Yes, better faster networks with lower latency are always a good thing. And, in time, these networks will power a lot of nifty things. But if you read press coverage of the technology, you'd walk away thinking that 5G is akin to some kind of mystical panacea; something you just sprinkle around on the sidewalk anytime you want innovation and magic to spring forth from between the cracks. It will somehow result in four-day workweeks, we're told. It will revolutionize cancer treatment, companies insist.

Wireless carriers facing slumping smartphone sales would certainly like you to think 5G is more revolutionary than it actually is. So would network hardware vendors eager to sell upgraded gear to those wireless carriers. But again, while faster networks are good, they're not magic, and it's the press' job to make it clear 5G is more evolution than revolution.

It's a hard lesson to learn, apparently. For example, this Tom's Hardware piece documenting five ways "5G will change your life" is rife with examples that will do nothing of the sort. Like this claim that 5G will somehow revolutionize the classroom:

"The faster speeds and lower latency that 5G will deliver will make AR and virtual reality transformative for kids in classrooms.

Toby Redshaw, Verizon's senior vice president of 5G innovation, offered a scenario in which 5G could make education more accessible: "You have a child that sits in a class for four hours. There's a presentation about China: a PowerPoint. It's a good environment. But there's another child in the class. [The teacher:] 'Put on that headset and we'll drop you into a 360-degree video so you can be [in China] without being there.' [The kid:] 'I'm flying over the Great Wall! That is unbelievable!' The second child had an experience. A whole chunk of his brain lit up. That immersive environment is between three and eight times more effective."

But guess what? Classrooms already have gigabit+ connectivity in the form of cheaper, more reliable WiFi. Why would said classrooms suddenly decided to pay Verizon for 5G to fuel their VR goggles, assuming VR is being used at all, when their existing connections can already easily power these technologies for less money? Another of the five examples in the piece, hospital diagnostics, suffers from the same logical problem:

"Just as 5G could make it easier for kids to experience subjects that most of us have only read about in books, next-gen speeds combined with augmented reality could also make it easier for doctors to learn and perfect procedures."

But as we just noted, no hospital is going to use 5G for next-gen VR and AR diagnostics when the kind of bandwidth 5G provides is already available over the hospital's existing WiFi or Ethernet connections. And no medical professional worth their salt is going to trust a sensitive medical procedure to a frequently capped and throttled cellular network. Especially when we're talking about Verizon, a company recently under fire for throttling and upselling firefighters as they attempted to fight one of the biggest fires in California history.

Other examples in the story are equally thin. Autonomous and smart cars, for example, can already use 4G networks. 5G might be faster and more reliable, but it's not going to just start crapping out autonomous cars in and of itself. Similarly, given what's likely to be high cost and spotty availability, 5G isn't really going to be a panacea when it comes to broadband competition either. In other words, four of the article's five "life changing" examples either aren't real or are being over-hyped. And like most of these reports, it ignores that thanks to regulatory capture, the biggest impact 5G is likely to have on most of us is going to be higher prices.

Filed Under: 5g, education, hype, journalism, wireless

Verizon Now Pretending That 5G Will Help Cure Cancer

from the ill-communication dept

Fifth-generation wireless (5G) will be a good thing when it finally arrives at scale in a few years, in that faster, more reliable networks are always good. But at the same time, 5G's capabilities have been comically over-hyped by cellular carriers and network hardware vendors looking to sell more cell phones and network hardware. Cellular carriers appear to be in a race to to broadly misrepresent not only what 5G is capable of--but where and when it will actually be available to the public at large.

Verizon, who has scolded other companies for over-hyping the technology, has been one of the biggest culprits in over-hyping 5G. On any given day Verizon's executives and marketing efforts can be found claiming that 5G will revolutionize the planet, magically enabling the smart cities and smart cars of tomorrow. In recent months, the company's marketing has proclaimed that 5G will somehow result in massive evolutionary leaps in medical technology, its ads going so far as to suggest that surgeons will soon be more accurate:

If you look at the replies to that Tweet, the message isn't being received too well by the public. Most are curious why they'd trust any medical procedure to a cellular connection. And many more have wondered why anybody would put their life in the hands of a company recently busted throttling and upselling firefighters as they struggled to battle the biggest wildfire in California's history. That's not stopping Verizon, which has been running several video ads -- replete with sad music -- claiming that 5G will even revolutionize cancer treatment:

When you visit Verizon's website to learn more, you'll quickly find there's not much there in the way of evidence supporting Verizon's claims. Yes, faster, lower latency networks are good in general, but they alone won't magically create new, innovative technology. And much of the stuff Verizon is hyping (like smart cars) can run just as well on 4G networks. The generational bump from 4G to 5G is more of a natural evolution than a revolution, and while the public will benefit -- we're not talking about some world-shaking paradigm shift.

As for 5G's impact on medicine, when I spoke to an ER doctor last week about Verizon's claims, he noted that 5G isn't even likely to be widely used for hospital diagnostics or treatment, since the lion's share of that technology will use existing hospital gigabit WiFi and Ethernet connections:

"Christian Dameff, an ER doctor and cyber security researcher at the University of California, San Diego, told Motherboard that hospitals generally utilize WiFi or Ethernet connections that already deliver the gigabit speeds and low latency that Verizon is advertising for 5G networks.

“The use of mobile connectivity such as 4G is rare in medical devices or diagnostic equipment because hospitals have traditionally relied on local connections as the primary architecture for their vast networks,” Dameff said. “WiFi and Ethernet currently simplifies disparate system integration, scales better, and is the status quo over most of the healthcare industry in the United States."

5G might have some application in remote diagnostics and treatment, but there too the revolutionary impact will be far more modest than Verizon suggests. Dameff argued that if Verizon really wanted to cure cancer, it would take money spent on ads over-hyping 5G, and actually donate that to cancer research:

"I do not see any significant cancer breakthroughs being dependent on 5G,” Dameff said. “In my opinion, we should take the money spent on these well-produced commercials touting medical advantages of 5G and donate them to cancer research. That would help cancer patients more than 5G itself."

Ultimately Verizon's hype is a disservice to itself. By routinely overstating availability and capability, Verizon is associating 5G in the public's mind with bluster and bullshit. That may help sell Luddite politicians on Verizon's desired policy agendas in DC, but it won't help Verizon in terms of its longer-term goal: accelerating stalled smartphone sales and the purchase of more expensive data plans.

Filed Under: 5g, cancer, telemedicine, wireless
Companies: verizon

Trump Ponders Banning All Chinese-Made Gear From US 5G Networks

from the unintended-consequences dept

We've already noted extensively how the "race to fifth generation wireless (5G)" is kind of a dumb thing. While 5G is important in the way that faster, better networks are always important, the purported Earth-rattling benefits of the technology have been painfully over-hyped. And they've been painfully over-hyped largely for two reasons: one, mobile carriers want to give a kick to stalling cellphone sales numbers, and network hardware vendors like Cisco want to drive the adoption of new, more expensive, telecom hardware.

The "race to 5G" isn't a race. And even if it were, our broadband maps are so intentionally terrible, we'd have no idea if and when we'd won it. Regardless, 5G has subsequently become a sort of magic pixie dust of tech policy conversations, justifying all manner of sometimes dubious policy. But the underlying desire to simply sell more kit has also infected the Trump administration's protectionist attacks on companies like Huawei, which is based on about 40% actual cybersecurity concerns, and 60% lobbying efforts by US hardware vendors that don't want to compete with cheaper Chinese hardware.

The Trump administration's war on Chinese network manufacturers has not been subtle, even though evidence supporting wholesale spying allegations against companies like Huawei has been arguably lacking. This week rumblings emerged that the Trump administration would soon be accelerating this effort by potentially banning absolutely any Chinese-made hardware from being used in US 5G networks, at all:

"As the Journal noted, such a requirement would force European companies Nokia Corp. and Ericsson, which currently dominate the sales of equipment to U.S. wireless carriers, to move their operations out of China or potentially lose access to the American market. That could potentially have a bigger impact on the market than any deal to end the ongoing trade standoff, as it may permanently alter the global technology markets—though both Nokia and Ericsson have already started working on plans to pull out of China due to the Trump administration’s escalating trade war tariffs."

There's a few problems with this. One remains the fact that despite an 18 month investigation, nobody has been able to provide a shred of proof that Huawei spies on Americans wholesale, the very allegation that began this whole effort. Two, smaller US telecom carriers say such bans will have a profoundly negative impact on their ability to compete in the States, since cheaper Chinese gear helps them better manage the tight margins of deploying service to lower ROI areas:

"RWA’s members estimate it might cost from $800 million to $1 billion for them to replace all the potentially affected gear from their wireless networks—costs they believe the government is legally required to reimburse."

Guess who'll pay for that? Hint: not carriers or the government.

The other problem is the myopic focus on Chinese telecom equipment. If the concern genuinely is cybersecurity, what about the Chinese hardware that exists in everything from smart refrigerators to residential routers? This all contains a universe of Chinese-made hardware susceptible to supply chain attacks. And what about the vast universe of shitty, poorly-secured IOT Chinese hardware that Americans happily connect to their home and business networks every day? If cybersecurity, and not say protectionism, is the real motivator, why is the focus so narrowly tailored to just telecom equipment?

Another problem remains the US' hypocrisy on this subject. The NSA, with BFF AT&T, have been busted repeatedly spying on everything and everyone. The statement being made here is obvious to anybody not infected by patriotic fervor: it's OK to covertly spy on the world if you're the United States, but the faintest allegation of China doing the same thing will result in a massive protectionist ban. The same kind of ban we'd be freaking out over were the shoe to be on the other foot.

Again, none of this is to say that China is an angel or that it doesn't routinely engage in some terrible behavior. But the Trump administration's "solution" to these problems is light on evidence, myopic to a fault, largely hypocritical, and fails to really address the bigger problems at hand if concern for cybersecurity is genuinely the driving motivator.

Filed Under: 5g, china, infrastructure, surveillance, telecom gear
Companies: cisco, ericsson, huawei, nokia

Consensus Quietly Builds That 5G Was Overhyped, Rushed To Market

from the ill-communication dept

Buried underneath the blistering hype surrounding fifth-generation (5G) wireless is a quiet but growing consensus: the technology is being over-hyped, and early incarnations were rushed to market in a way that prioritized marketing over substance. That's not to say that 5G won't be a good thing when it arrives at scale several years from now, but early offerings have been almost comical in their shortcomings. AT&T has repeatedly lied about 5G availability by pretending its 4G network is 5G. Verizon has repeatedly hyped early non-standard launches that, when reviewers actually got to take a look, were found to be barely available.

If you looked past press releases you'd notice that Verizon's early launches required the use of $200 battery add on mod because we still haven't really figured out the battery drain issues presented by 5G's power demands. You'd also notice the growing awareness that the long-hyped millimeter wave spectrum being used for many deployments have notable distance and line of sight issues, meaning that rural and much of suburban America will not likely see the speeds you'll frequently see bandied about in marketing issues, and many of the same coverage gap issues you see with current-gen broadband are likely to persist.

If you looked past the headlines you'd probably noticed that even Wall Street was concerned that 5G was being over-hyped and wasn't yet ready for prime time. Those concerns continue to be expressed largely in industry trade magazines, where you'll often find stock jocks noting that most of the purported promises of 5G remain well over the horizon:

"What of the other fancy features of 5G, like massive IoT and ultra low latency? Specifications for those technologies are scheduled for availability in -- wait for it -- 2020, when the 3GPP's Release 16 is scheduled to be finished.

"We believe the current investment opportunity associated with 5G is limited and unlikely to drive meaningful incremental upside for companies involved considering the mature state of the smartphone market," wrote the analysts at Wall Street research firm Cowen in a recent note to investors."

None of this is to say that these early deployments aren't providing some very useful knowledge that will inform broader deployment. And when "real" 5G does start to slowly materialize over the next decade or so the ultra-low latency and high-speeds will ultimately help improve connectivity -- provided it's available to you. But consumer groups like the EFF continue to point out how 5G hype is obscuring our repeated failure to deploy fiber (necessary to feed cellular towers) across America despite countless billions in subsidies having been thrown at telecom giants:

"All this hype over 5G networks by these large companies has done little to answer fundamental questions in the U.S. broadband market: why are the largest ISPs not aggressively deploying fiber to the home despite its proven track record of profits and success? How is it that the United States, as the FCC has recently acknowledged, starting to slow down on fiber to the home, whereas the rest of the world moving is faster? Fiber to the home is cheap to upgrade to even higher speeds once it is laid, making it an infrastructure investment that will be good for decades to come. And its top speeds are already dwarfing even the loftiest 5G hyped assertions."

Meanwhile, these early 5G marketing missteps are creating an aura of distrust in the minds of American consumers. Instead of being directly and clearly shown what the standard can do in the form of fully-cooked product, consumers are being taught that carriers still can't really be trusted to accurately portray where or when the technology will be available to them. And that's of course before you get to how much more 5G is going to cost everyone, or how many nickel-and-dime restrictions will be included in these next-generation networks in the wake of the repeal of net neutrality, hampering its full competitive potential.

Filed Under: 5g, overhype, wireless