Mythbusting 5G
By: Jasper Ruijs
Tags: 5g, Opinion Piece, Internet of Things, 5g Technology, Futurism

“All lies and jest, still the man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.” — Paul Simon

The wildest 5G network conspiracies circulate the internet. I will not take your valuable time by addressing them.

Most news articles, expert reviews focus on a specific area of the 5G society. The idea is to persuade you of their vision of the 5G world. If you take time to do a few Google searches, you will know that science isn’t conclusive on the potential risks of 5G.

To give you an overview of the wide variety of ideas on what 5G implies for humanity, I have grouped several expert views from different areas, under three seemingly ungrounded statements that circulate the internet.

This blogpost has to be read as a teaser for self-inquiry about the 5G topic. I am well aware that its difficult to say anything meaningful if I include multiple perspectives. But in a globalized world, someone has to put the puzzle together.

In between the myth-busting, I will challenge you to reflect on your position. Because the implementation of the 5G network will transform the way, we think as a species about what it means to be human in a digital world.

Eventually, you will need to position yourself in this ongoing debate. So I recommend you — educate yourself.

Myth#1. — 5G radiation is dangerous for the body

Founding Father

Bill.P. Curry, a consultant, and physicist, published in 2000 this graph to show that tissue damage increases with the rising frequency of radio waves.

Sadly, he failed to account for the shielding effect of human skin.

According to science journalist and senior writer at the New York Times, William J. Broad, fearmongering websites picked up Curry’s research and assumed the correlation between cancer and cellphones. Besides all the conspiracies that sprung, even some lawsuits used this graph to make insubstantial claims.

Bouncing Off

To elaborate, why 5G isn’t so dangerous for the body, we have to make a stop at physics to explain frequency.

If you jump on a trampoline, you get bounced back up. Your mass is denser than the trampoline mat. Else you would fall on the ground.

Now imagine that your skin is the trampoline’s mat, and the sunlight is the jumper. When the light of the sun touches your arms skin, it bounces back into your eyes. If the light would get absorbed, you couldn’t see your body parts. Hence no sunlight can reach through your skin to reach the bones. Take a good look at the next image.

According to David Robert Grimes, a cancer researcher and physicist, we should not fall prey to 5G scaremongering. To put 5g in perspective compared to ionizing radiation, which is detrimental to our health, capable of damaging DNA and killing;

The weakest visible light is more than 17,000 times more energetic than the highest-energy 5G photon possible.

In other words, 5G rays are not ionizing, so rationalists would argue that 5G does not pose any risks.

But this technology is still relatively new. We have no idea about the long term physical effects of exposing skin to frequencies of the 4G and 5G networks.

Mental Aftermath

Whereas most activists focus on potential health and environmental risks, I think people should focus on the information overload caused by the internet.

With faster upload speeds of the 5G and the ongoing globalization process, I assume people will be bombarded with even more information very day. Nowadays, I find it increasingly difficult to distinguish between opinion, fact, and lies by omission.

Does humanity drown in the abundance of knowledge?

Balance

I believe technology isn’t bad or good. I speculate that without the 4G network, we wouldn’t have had the Arabic Spring, Me Too, and Black Lives Matter movement. Also, digital nomadism, online freelancing, dropshipping, growth hacking, and digital marketing wouldn’t have evolved. On average, the world would be worse off.

Of course, there are pitfalls of this digitalization process, like the-always-available -mentality, FOMO, cyberbullying, burnouts, fake news, and remote hacking. Light doesn’t exist without its shade and vice versa.

Likewise, the 5G network will have fantastic potential and dark undertones.

Conclusion

The myth that 5G Radiation is dangerous for health is partially plausible. According to the common sense of science, the potential physical risk of 5G is often exaggerated. However, we lack research on the long term effects of low-frequency radiation exposure to the skin.

I don’t have a clear image of how a 5G civilization operates. Thus I can only hypothesize that humanity can’t cope with an information overload.

Photo by Morning Brew on Unsplash

Myth #2–5G makes 4G obsolete.

Network features

The efficiency of a network depends on speed, latency, and coverage.

Speed is the number of milliseconds it takes to download information from a server to your cellphone. On average, the download speed is 10 to 50 Mbps(megabits per second) on a 4G network.

Netflix recommends 25 Mbps for Ulta HD, but it only needs 5 Mbps for HD streaming. 5G aims to hit 50Mbps as an average minimum. If you use your phone network to Chromecast a Netflix Or Amazone Prime tv show, you know that 4G is already excellent at streaming HD.

The internet of things

The internet of things is a network where every object communicates with each other for optimal efficiency.

In our current 4G world, the latency or upload speed of a network is 50 milliseconds. 5G has the potential to drop that latency to 1 ms.

For context, the brain processes images in at least 10 ms. To realize the world of the internet of things, which includes self-driving traffic, cloud gaming, and immersive virtual reality — low latency is vital.

Coverage

The price of a high latency network is that the bandwidth is much shorter than the 4g network. In layman terms, every hundred meters, you need a new antenna. The signal doesn’t travel far.

According to RCR Wireless News, South Korean KT, provider of the network of the 2018 Winter Olympic games in Peyeong Chang, needed 46 antennas for the 4G infrastructure and 212 for the 5G network.

Disadvantage

Because the frequency of the 5G network is slightly higher compared to 4G, it cannot penetrate solid objects easily, like cars, trees, and walls.

One valid argument against the 5G network posed by a British MP, Geraint Davies:

It is ridiculous to clear away the trees for better efficiency of the 5G network, when you have ambitions for zero carbon emissions to slow down climate change.

Integration

Because both networks have their strengths, the 5G network functions as an extension of the already existing 4G infrastructure. Large 4G antennae are connected to smaller 5G antenna’s to get the best of both worlds.

Conclusion

The myth that 5G makes 4G obsolete is busted. Both the 4G and 5G networks will continue to exist as they compliment each other.

Myth#3–5G makes internet surveillance easier

Before we dive into politics, there are three different aspects of internet security: privacy laws, encryption of data, vulnerability to hacking.

Privacy Regulation

Most privacy legislature is normative. The basic idea is protection against corporate interests to abuse the insights after the analysis of your data. But some laws give governments the ability to spy on other countries.

I find it hypocritical when you agree as a society that spying on your civilians is unethical. Still, under the motto of self-defense of the nation, a government may spy on foreign people.

China

According to Emmanuel Pernot-Leplay, a data consultant at Deloitte with a Ph.D. in comparative law,

China data privacy laws follow allong the lines of the European GDPR, and diverges from the U.S., which does not afford the same level of protection and for example allows internet providers to sell users’ data without their consent to this purpose.

Although the Chinese are strengthening the protection of the digital identity against private entities and they also increase of government’s access to personal data, as there is still no significant privacy protection against government intrusion.

China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law, which says organizations must “support, co-operate with and collaborate in national intelligence work,” means that Beijing could force any company like Huawei to do its bidding.

USA

Laura Hautala, a staff reporter at Cnet, thinks that the PRISM and Upstream spy programs were renewed when Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Ac passed both houses of Congress and President Donald Trump in 2018.

Section 702 permits the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence to jointly authorize the targeting of persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States but is limited to targeting non-U.S. persons.

The PRISM and Upstream programs exist to collect online communications of foreigners outside the US. Prism takes the communications directly from internet services like email providers and video chat programs, and Upstream taps into the infrastructure of the internet to pull in the communications while they’re in transit.

Both China and the USA like to point fingers to the lack of privacy. Both are guilty of the crime exploiting digital identities by wiretapping the internet.

Encryption

Forbes Technology Council Member, Andy Pury, argues that the 5G network 256 bits roaming encryption will be better than the current standard of 128 bits of the 4G network.

Blurring the lines

One concern is that the boundary between the radio access network (RAN) and the network core will start to vanish as enhanced computing power moves closer to the network edge.

The core is the network’s brain, which controls authentication, encryption to sensitive customer data. Alternatively, the RAN is the network’s arms and legs.

It is the place at the network’s outer edge, where it receives signals from smartphones and other devices and transmits them back to the core, using cell phone towers or base stations.

Source = Oreilly

According to Heavy Reading, the research division of B2B digital media platform Light Reading “to deliver services over a 5G RAN, requires a system architecture and core network.” Hence any mobile technology that doesn’t include this separation would not be compatible with our internet network.

Hacker proof

Rest assured that most telecommunications operators are advised to use multiple vendors for encryption.

A friend of mine who is a cloud engineer ensured me that most companies minimize the danger of a hack by storing personal data in multiple cloud databases — each uses a different entree key and another authentication system. Even if a hacker collective would succeed, they can’t link the dataset to the users or vise versa.

Vulnerability

There are a lot of different perspectives on the vulnerability of the 5G network. So I will address three controversial views.

Loopholes

Senator Mark Warner says:

” Any supposedly safe Chinese product is one firmware update away from being an insecure Chinese product.

Foreign companies seem more challenging to trust because they don’t get the same annual audits as the tech giants Facebook, Google, and Apple.

Worst case scenario

The government of China could force Huawei to make a small backdoor in their next framework update and use it to steal sensitive data, hiding the breach in the plain sight, buried under thousands of lines of code.

Then before some ethical hacker group can spot the hole in security, they remove the breach in the next update. In Niclas Weaver’s words, a researcher at the international computer science institute — sabotage, can be very subtle.

The race

Yuval Noah Harari, the writer of the bestseller Homo Sapiens, says in the Tim Ferris podcast, that Google is racing to crack the code on how to predict human behavior consistently.

The 5G network would be a goldmine for all growth hackers, digital marketers, psychologists, governments, and machine learning companies because they could better analyze large quantities of data.

Self-reflection

Some disturbing questions to ask yourself. Are we the sum of all our life experiences? If so, is life experience quantifiable? If you agree, are we then our data?