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The 5G Morass – tales and tattles or reasons for concern?

Times of Israel

By Paul Ben-Ishai, PhD, Senior Lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Department of Applied physics. As an expert in Dielectric Physics and its application to Material Science as an investigative technique, he is one of the few people in Israel who works in both dielectric physics and Terahertz science, both for applications and for spectroscopy. He currently holds 3 patents in these fields and has published over 50 articles.

JAN 31, 2021, 7:33 AM

The 5G Morass – tales and tattles or reasons for concern?

Excepts from the article:

“Last week someone sent me a WhatsApp link to an article by Avior Abu in the Calcalist. Quietly, under the cover of our political chaos, an interdepartmental committee is trying to overthrow the right of a municipality to decide where a cell phone antenna will be erected in its jurisdiction. Their reasons being that while we want our cellphone, we don’t want to see their base stations or antennas in our backyard, even as we complain about poor coverage and slow data speeds. In this age of Corona, improved coverage sounds a good thing …. or is it?  Will such a power be abused at industry’s whim? During the early 2000 the cellphone companies in Israel routinely exploited a loophole in the law to place cellphone antennas inside apartments. It took a Knesset law to stop that and so one cannot rely on industry playing fair. It is a pertinent question because in the next few years industry is promising us a 5G revolution. And this revolution will demand a massive deployment of antenna infrastructure.  And that sort of power is easily abused. All in the name of “progress” so that nothing will stop the deployment of 5G networks here is Israel.”

“And why the need for such a drastic step to be taken by this committee? Because there is already public opposition to 5G cellular networks and it is increasing difficult to receive municipal planning permission for cellphone towers. The reasons for public concern range from the frankly ridiculous conspiracy theories to a genuine worry about the effect of cellphone radiation on our health.”

“Is 5G “Green”, i.e. Environmentally sound?

At the moment the only fully operational 5G is in China and they are not happy.

The Chinese experience with 5G densification and energy cost is not positive.  The Chinese finance minister, Lou Jiwei, has expressed public concerns.  5G base stations in Luoyang province have be switched off at night to save money [7,9].  In 2020 there were significant increases in energy costs  with an increase of 13% for China’s mobile utilities [9].  Estimates for the increases in power consumption range from a two to three fold increase to nine times increases [9,10].  Coupled to the expected densification of the infrastructure, linked to the relatively small cell size for 5G compared to 4G [5] , it is clear that 5G in not a green technology.  Its increased energy consumption will lead to increased emissions and a clear environmental impact.”

Read the rest of this article at https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-5g-morass-tales-and-tattles-or-reasons-for-concern/