5G: The Trouble With the New Phone Network

"I think everyone would be better off if the worries from scientists were taken more seriously in the design stage and not grumpingly acknowledged half through a global roll-out." Amen to that.

That quote. “Just because you can doesn’t mean you should”

I love Sabine, she has given me my biggest belly laugh this year ! 3:00 "There's a reason they haven't been previously used for telecommunication, and it's not because millimetre waves are also used as goodbyes for in-laws."

Your videos/ attitude gives me hope - that sanity and ‘clear ‘ thinking still exists! 🙏

I accidentally watched this at 360p and didn't notice till after it had finished. You don't need extreme high definition on a small screen.

Shocking that a trade group disputes science that is inconvenient to the interests they represent. Just as shocking: US govt calls it "contentious" while choosing a side. And the side they chose (again, so shocked) is that of the business interest.

I had no idea the effect 5G might have on weather forecasting... Seems like a massive oversight to something extremely critical

Telecom companies don't want to provide the speed that 4G gives, instead they want to sell something new to the people using the speed card.

I think the difference between -20dBW and -55dBW is nearer 3 orders of magnitude than 30, as dB is 10 log10(x) where power ratios are concerned. Excellent video as always, though.

Whenever science comes into conflict with money, money wins. It's how it always works.

Informative and well made video! Just one error I noticed at 15:55: you referred to the FCC's 35dBW-higher limit compared to the WMO's as "more than 30 orders of magnitude above", but every 10 decibels are a power of ten, not every 1 decibel (≈ *1.2589). Thus it should have been "more than 3 orders of magnitude above".

4g and similar stuff is just fine, which is a problem for a whole industry that is predicated on producing and selling new technology with faster and faster transfer rates. At some point (probably already) they will have to arbitrarily change the technology with little to no consumer benefit

I'm definitely in favour of hard limits on leakage around scientifically important frequencies. These frequencies are discrete and well defined. The impact on commercial utilization is tolerable, and the loss of the scientific utilization is not. I'd say this one is pretty clear cut, even if it means a trip back to the drawing board. I like the apparent European approach - just hold off on auctioning those bands for now.

You know, a really, really simple solution here is just "switch" out that one 5G channel directly above the 24 GHz water vapor channel: very little degradation of databandwidth in the network and less interference... Thank you Sabine for another fascinating production! 👍

High quality and concise, as usual.

Thank you for explaining this complex situation.

In 2013 we discovered I had a “terminal” case of Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. My baseline PET scan, prior to treatment, showed a dense inguinal tumor the exact size and orientation of the antenna in my iPhone (per engineering teardown). I had always kepy my phone in my pants pocket juxtaposed to where we found the tumor. No one in the medical community wanted to report this black-and-white finding to state or federal regulatory agencies. The reason, they stated, was that the telecom industrial complex was too powerful and wealthy - nothing would come of it, other than risk to my doctors. I was fighting for life for several years, so we had no appetite to pursue the matter. Big money doesn’t care about the everyday person, and their corruption has now gripped governments. We beat cancer, though sequelae has left me severely handicapped, home bound, and alone. You can bet that I rarely put a cellphone near my body, and then only briefly.

In the UK we can't get a decent weather forecast for more than 12 hours ahead. Not because of bad science, but the constant shifting of our air currents interacting.

Love your videos. The way you explain things is quite clear and understandable. Just a small trivial thing is we don’t have squirrels 🐿 in New Zealand we have a few kiwi birds they’ll just have to watch that instead.

A couple of points, 5G is used on several bands, not just mmWave. In fact it's often used on the exact same bands as 4G, 3G, 2G and 1G. It's just expanded to include mmWaves. That said, mmWave is a huge spread, with only part of it close to the frequencies used by vapour detection. In fact, there a 4 mmWave bands allocated for 5G and only one of them is near it. The other 3 are further up the spectrum. So, it's just a small piece of the mmWave spectrum that's the problem, not 5G in general. Incidentally, there is another area where 5G is getting unwarranted blame. That's with the with the n77/n78 band, which starts at 3.3 GHz. This is close to the frequency used by radio altimeters, as used on aircraft. There was a lot of noise from the aviation community about this. However, it turns out no one bothered to do any testing. They just assumed. Turns out it's a problem with certain older altimeter models that had inadequate filters. Adding a filter fixes that problem. Also, aviation regulators have often ordered equipment upgrades, as technology advanced. Certainly that vapour detection must be considered, with spectrum allocated and equipment designed appropriately to avoid the problem. One method that's often used is called a notch filter, where a filter is used to block specific frequencies. This combined with the usual band pass filters would likely remove the problem.