5G – What is it and do we need it? Something that is constantly in the news is this thing called 5G. It makes a change from the other unmentionable thing that we became heartily sick of, to the hind teeth. But this too has become a matter of political argy-bargy. Should Hoo-are-we be trusted? Or indeed the Chinese communists? When one reads of the Chinese-built servers in the African Union buildings in Addis Ababa waking up in the middle of the night and downloading (stealing) sensitive data to Shanghai, one wonders. Can we trust the Anglo-Americans? Does anyone care what The Donald and The Boris are bickering about? Personally, I don't give a monkey's about any of it – morbidly curious, maybe, although I do use a VPN and encryption software just in case! But I am interested in the technology and the social effects of a constantly changing landscape that divides people into the haves and the have-nots. Just as the have-nots think that they are finally catching up, the haves bound off into the distance with something new. 5G is likely to be that something new.
So do we need 5G? No. Of course not, but equally of course, we'll be told that we do need it until we start to believe the propaganda and, more germane, when our otherwise perfectly functional devices cease to function because everything new and updated is based upon the new technology, all that has gone before having been deprecated. We'll be forced into it to allow a small group of individuals and entities to become insanely wealthy, not to mention any unsavoury capabilities that such vast and rapid data transfer rates will create. If something new and shiny is available it has to be used. For example, storage and memory is becoming evermore abundant and cheap. My wife's interface (between her, 'the product', and 'them') became unusable purely due to the abundance of data. When I purchased it for her just a few years ago, I believed that a storage capacity of 8Gb would be a plenitude. Now, I am of the generation that used floppy discs with a staggering capacity of 512Kb and that was fine because everything was designed with that in mind. This device (I hesitate to call it a 'phone' as that capability is just a minor sub-function) arrived with half of that capacity pre-filled with the operating system and a large array of apps that cannot be deleted, only disabled. They are all Google apps which you are forced to accept as the price of a 'free' operating system. It got to the point where, every day, she was deleting cache and cookies and everything non-essential just to make it get through the day. I bought her a new one when the whining became too much to bear. It has got 64Gb of storage. So is that 60Gbs of useable space? Nope. Only 52Gb. The operating system and its associated cr*p has ballooned to 12Gb. Because it's there to be used... 5G will be the same.
What is 5G? I have done a lot of reading on the subject which was, quite frankly, tiresome: a stream of acronyms and meaningless techno-babble. What I have learned is that 5G means different things to different vendors. It has to use different technology to be recognised as a new generation but the main difference is the frequency spectrum in use. This is divided into low-band (600MHz – 2.4GHz), mid-band (2.4GHz – 4.2GHz) and millimetre waves (24GHz – 72GHz). The thing about waves is that the higher their frequency the shorter the distance they can travel before completely attenuating. Anyone who has driven north through France and curious of goings-on at home would have been amazed at the distance travelled by long wave radio; Radio 4 in the Loire valley but of very poor quality. Up at Calais, it is quite possible to get MW Radio 4, which is OK but not great. It is only upon approaching the Kent coast can one finally receive an FM signal. But have you noticed how that FM signal is lost whenever an obstacle is encountered – the Folkestone tunnel on the A20, overbridges in general and the deep undulations of the A303 west of Amesbury? This highlights a problem. That although the higher range frequencies carry far more data at higher speeds and therefore provide a much better service, they have a limited distance and are increasingly susceptible to distortion and obstruction. 5G will need to resolve this problem. Low-band 5G will be using similar frequencies to the more robust of the extant 4G services. The technology will be better, allowing many more connections to any given antenna, but the basic service will be roughly the same. So beware. Just because it is branded as 5G does not necessarily mean that you can expect a step-change in your service (5G Evolution, should you come across it, is 4G under a misleading brand-name). At the other end, and what we might think of when we hear the hype, is the mmWave service – so-called because the distance between waves can be measured in millimetres. This is the high frequency, brilliant Wi-Fi service that is going to take over our lives and make humans redundant. It will power the Internet of Things (IoT). As we near our journey's end our driverless car will alert the house. The heating will come, so too the lights. The kettle will boil just as we enter through the keyless entry system that detects our personal pheromones. A few days earlier the fridge will have contacted the Associated Dairies and a drone will arrive with milk, bread, eggs and an empty meat pie; and what will be the point of life...? But, as with the FM radio, mmWave does not travel far from home – or around corners or through brick walls. In fact, you'll likely need to be within 100 – 200m of an antenna to use this system. So if you live in a 5G urban area with an antenna on every corner and drive only on 5G enabled highways, it'll work for you – if that's what you want.
I live in the Highlands of Scotland and instantly you see the problem. There are still many areas that would dearly love to have any Gs at all: unaffectionately known as 'notspots'. There are lots of them – Glen Lyon, Loch Rannoch, Mallaig, most of Skye... Here's Edinburgh and Glasgow and the M8 being covered in new infrastructure, antennae sprouting everywhere and still, there will be rural areas where the ability to make or receive a phone call on a mobile device would be regarded as progress! A whole new level of haves and have-nots. And do you know where I would prefer to be? Aye. If progress is all about downloading Ben Hur in three seconds flat, then I'm all for taking the slow road.
There are health concerns. Mostly they are poo-pooed, dissed, ridiculed and generally waved away as nonsense by the haughty. So why are cities such as Brussels and Geneva refusing to take part, pending further investigation? Other Swiss cantons are implementing moratoria and in the UK the councils of Brighton, Frome and Totnes are taking on the corporate giants and refusing to accept 5G antennae. A 2011 IARC report decided that all frequencies of 30KHz to 300GHz are likely carcinogenic in humans. A quote from a Dr Martin Pall is readily found: “Putting in tens of millions of 5G antennae without a single biological test of safety has got to be about the stupidest idea anyone has had in the history of the world.” There is real concern about the effects in humans of absorbing such high-powered, intense doses of radiation. But that is not on the agenda of governments and corporations. And so we return to the question: what is 5G for? Is it really for us to download cinematic epics in an instant? For virtual war-gamers to carry on the slaughter without buffering? And for the IoT to take away those final vestiges of dignity and freewill that we thought we still had? Or is it for mass surveillance and espionage – on us and on them? You decide. I know where my suspicions lay!
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