5G: The Trouble With the New Phone Network

Correction to what I say at 15 mins 57 seconds: It's should be 3 orders of magnitude, not 30.

You'd think that technology and science make a good team, and most often that's true, but every once in a while they get into a big fight. One such case is the 5th generation of wireless networks, 5G for short, that's become a big headache for meteorologist because millimeter waves interfere with the weather forecast. On that occasion I also tell you about a recent review on the health effects of 5G and what 6G may bring.

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The Cisco estimate for the 5G use is here:

The call from the WHO for 5G studies is here:

The two CTIA blogposts are here:

00:00 Intro
00:48 Sponsor message
02:13 What's new about 5G?
03:56 Why is 5G controversial?
06:30 How 5G affects the weather forecast
10:00 Meteorologists are not happy
11:15 The other side of the story
14:08 6G
15:22 What's the lesson?

#science #technology

[llamallama]

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.

[muzvid]

"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.

[barrychickini]

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

[bannerman]

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."

[joewwilliams]

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.

[LabyrinthMike]

To be honest, I thought 4G was fast enough.

[sadas]

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.

[radwimp]

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

[rebeccaschade]

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

[nickglazzard]

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.

[TLguitar]

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".

[YellowCable]

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

[LeonCouch]

Very clear and well-paced presentation with good definitions of acronymns and engineering concepts, with actual numbers, as well as summary of the politics around the topics. Thanks.

[hikingpete]

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.

[laaradee]

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

[thecarpenter]

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.

[samhianblackmoon]

Yet another excellent video, love your channel Sabine 👊🏽❤️

[TyMoore]

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! 👍

[recordtronic]

I love your videos. Very informative, and I like the deadpan manner in which you drop a joke or a dunk.

[MykePagan]

One quibble: when Sabine talks about the future capabilities of 6G she mentions the enablement of various use cases with “instantaneous access.” This is not quite true. 6G provides greater bandwidth (as 5G did, and 4G before that), but *latency* is not as dramatically imoroved. Many of those science fiction applications also demand very low latency in addition to large bandwidth. Getting lower latencies is possible, but it can be a more costly engineering problem to address.