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Comment by wazoox | Hacker News Reader

Why 5G is dangerous : because mm-wave can't get out of a paper bag, we'll need a tremendous number of antennas everywhere, consuming a tremendous amount of resources and burning a tremendous amount of energy. For what benefit exactly? I don't want 5G. I'm very certain we have really urgent problems of climate, pollution, biodiversity, resources to tackle, and we certainly don't need any new planned-obsolescence systems. No to 5G. And of course, no to 8K TV.

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I don’t think that’s a very useful way to think about resource allocation. It’s not practical to only focus on what is deemed the single most important problem facing the world. Even if it could be done, it’s likely not even the most efficient way to solve problems, due to competitive advantage.

MM-waves used for 5C also work via VGCC activation. 5C is designed to carry extraordinarily high amounts of information per second and is, therefore, extraordinarily highly pulsed. The electrical parts of these MM-waves do not penetrate well into buildings, such that millions of 5C antennae are planned in close proximity to our home, schools, churches, businesses, etc, such that it will be nearly impossible to avoid exposures. Given the high pulsation level for 5C radiation, even short exposures may well produce severe biological effects. In addition to this, the finding that 5C systems involve output power sometimes like 30 times higher output than did previous systems, we have an strong argument for disaster (Human exposure to RF fields in 5G downlinI Nasim, S Kim - arXiv preprintarXiv:1711.03683, 2017 - arxiv.org)

It looks like your link is broken. Is this the preprint you're referring to?

"Human Exposure to RF Fields in 5G Downlink" Imtiaz Nasim, Seungmo Kim https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.03683

>I don't want 5G

Better switch back to 2G by that logic then cause 3/4G also requires higher density of towers

I for one am excited about the opportunities for team meetings over AR, which to do right would require these higher bandwidths

I would prefer to be able to listen to podcasts while driving in the vast, empty wastelands outside urban areas.

This sort of has been solved for 50 (wild guess) years with portable music players. Sure it is not exactly the same, and sure there's the extra recording step, but once that is done (which for downloadable stuff nowadays takes a fraction of the playback time) you have something which is better in some ways because it's offline. Don't get me wrong here: I'm not acvocating to go back, but in some ways it's strange to see new technology being used so widely yet people suffering to get things done which were actually better with older technology. Battery life is another one. The 2 of them combined in an example: I have a rather old portable player which takes micro SD cards. Even without swapping that's a huge amount of music. 2 AA batteries and the thing lasts for hundreds of hours. So purely for playing audio that solution really owns anything newer. Then again, it's of course also the only thing it does.

It's also a problem that's solved by podcast apps, and in an even better way because they self-update your content.

Definitely a shame that they make so many phones without microSD slots, though.

> Definitely a shame that they make so many phones without microSD slots, though.

Just don't buy those phones and that problem is solved.

Which is fine if that's your only requirement. I also want the ability to root my phone (and update it once the manufacturer support runs out in two years), and since I use T-mobile I want full support for their network (including 600MHz 5G). All achievable individually, but no phone supports all three.

> I for one am excited about the opportunities for team meetings over AR, which to do right would require these higher bandwidths

Setting aside whether that assumption is true, you don't have Wi-Fi?

Pretty sure that's not going to happen due to the sheer expense.

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