So, forgive the long post, but for those who want to understand some of the tech and physics behind "5G" - by all means, if this issue is important to you, feel free to verify my claims/explanations, etc.
>>5309685 pb
You are correct in that it isn't something most people are familiar with.
It is often easy for me to forget how different my own upbringing and experience has been. My father was a very intelligent man with a very diverse knowledge of engineering concepts, and I also remember all of my basic physics and units.
When terms like watts, wavelength, frequency, diffraction, etc get thrown around - I know exactly what is meant not just in a textbook sense, but in a sense of experience.
5g is mostly a higher carrier frequency. With higher carrier frequencies comes greater band width in the modulation, and therefore higher baud rates. The carrier frequency is the chief concern for most people, as well as the average power.
https://www.everythingrf.com/community/5g-frequency-bands
The low end is a revision of the 600MHz frequency band, the 2.5GHz-ish freq band, and the 4GHz freq band already in use in a number of CDMA and LTE networks.
The "new" ones are up into the 20+GHz range, as well as some really crazy stuff up into the 50+GHz range.
None of these devices are fundamentally higher power. In other words, the cell phone antenna isn't going to suddenly pump out 10 watts of power because 5g is 10x faster. Power and data rate are not the same thing. The increase in speed comes from the increased number of unique "tones" that can be generated within a given band.
https://networkengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/6014/what-is-the-relationship-between-the-bandwith-on-a-wire-and-the-frequency
There have been some expansions of the protocols to include sidebands and other such things, but the basic idea is the same. Modems are actually analog devices, not digital. Each modem is keyed to a certain frequency, and modulations of that frequency that can be differentiated are each tied to a string of 1s and 0s. The more tones that can fit, the greater number of bytes each tone can represent. The rate at which these tones can be sent is referred to as the baud rate.
Just amp the frequencies up from audio tones (20KHz) for 56k modems all the way to 30GHz, and you're basically looking at how smart phones work. You can pack a lot more channels onto the same tower with higher baud rates even when using the same bandwidth, resulting in much higher data rates, fewer towers, and more support for devices.
The concerns many have voiced have to do with how the way microwave energy changes its behavior as frequency increases. Wavelength is the distance the speed of light travels in one second divided by the frequency - since radio waves propagate at the speed of light and frequency is the number of times an AC current completes a cyclic action, the resulting wave has a length determined by that frequency.
This is where we can get into antennas, waveguides, shunted stubs, and even the break of symmetry that turns a conductor into an antenna… But half of this is magic even to those of us who study it, with our calculations being rough approximations or mathematical conveniences a bit more so than a complete theory.
Ionizing radiation is, more or less, radiation with a wavelength that is around 2x that of many polar molecules, or less. Ionizing radiation is where molecules, themselves, seem to become antennas and become subject to the effects of current flow and induced electrostatic differences across the molecule.
The question for many is if longer wavelengths can have similar effects, if at a much less prominent extent. After all, antennas many times smaller than the wavelength can be picked up, just at a much lower quality and coupling. Since DNA and other molecules are rather large, as are cellular structures - the concern is that these microwaves from the 5g networks are able to dissipate more power into these structures and cause problems similar to ionizing radiation, without actually being ionizing radiation in the engineering context.
Of course, these higher frequencies are also gobbled up by water. They don't penetrate deeply into the skin.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_absorption_by_water
30+GHz is in the millimeter band and approaches the sub-millimeter band. So the concerns are mostly about the effects on skin or organs close to the skin.
I have my concerns about RF exposure - but they are less to do with "fry ur brain" and far more to do with exactly where the RF power that hits the body is going - into the water of the body or into the cellular structures? Even if it is doing bad things, it's relatively minor compared to sunlight exposure and even the UV from fluorescent lighting. So - I'm not too worried about it killing people.