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How about a room-size cell phone? No? Okay, wait, how about….
Cell phone makers and telecom companies are increasingly desperate to keep us in the habit of trashing our phones every year or two in order to be among the first to own the Next Big Thing. That made some sense when cell phones were progressing from flip phones that couldn’t do anything but make a phone call to the web browsers/movie screens/GPS navigators/music players/cameras that they are today.
But there hasn’t been a Next Big Thing for quite a while now, and it’s getting really easy to see them sweat. Recently we’ve been offered three — count ‘em, three — cameras on a single phone. No thanks. For $2,000 you could earlier this year have bought a double wide phone with a screen that folds out to IMAX size: “It’s huge! It folds! It breaks! After just a few folds!” No thanks.
But they have it now. They are sure they have it now, it’s called 5G. The explanation is a little technical, so hold tight: using a combination of ultra-high, ultra-low and ultra-middle radio frequencies, 5G networks will dramatically increase download and upload speeds and reduce latency. Yeah, I don’t know what that means either. Apparently, if you have been cursing your phone for taking more than four seconds to download a two hour, high-definition movie for display on your IMAX-size fold out screen, then 5G is what you want.
But the really Big New Thing, apparently, is that 5G will enable the Internet of Things to flourish. It will be just the thing for the increasing number of people who feel the urge, several times a day, to whip out their phones and talk to their toasters. It will be, the hucksters are saying without blushing, a new industrial revolution. Which is, we will all agree, a good thing, because the first one is about pooped out.
Downside? No, ma’am, not in any of the ads I’ve read. Oh, you mean in the real world? Well, a couple things.
- To achieve coverage, 5G will require transmitters to be spaced every thousand feet or so. That’s one in every city block. Even at that, ultra-high-frequency waves will have a great deal of trouble penetrating things like walls. And rain, and hands. And sometimes, air.
- 5G phones need more hardware to do more things and thus are battery hogs. So your phone is either going to be a large clunker, or you are going to be tethered to a charger.
- Hundreds of scientists and researchers in 40 countries believe that the saturation of high frequency RF required by 5G networks will be as harmful to human health as exposure to asbestos and arsenic. The industry says that guidelines are in place to protect the public. The guidelines are based on a study of how much a cell phone heated the head of a plastic mannequin. It was done in 1996.
- Both the network and the phones that use them will be hideously expensive, therefore so will the service. By one estimate, installing enough transmitters to reach just half the American population would cost $400 billion.
- The rollouts attempted so far have not gone well. Perhaps most successful was AT&T, which simply changed the label on its 4G network to 5GE, the E standing for “evolution” and meaning “maybe someday.” Verizon announced rollouts in multiple urban markets, by which they meant that you could get service in your house by having a 5G cell tower installed on your roof. Korea (yes, there is a global race to be “first” in 5G) brags that it has a quarter-million 5G users, but many of them are unhappy with poor coverage and performance speed.
The hype is working gloriously in attracting go-go bankers, hedge fund high rollers and stock-breaking gamblers, and in today’s business environment the fact that it’s not working for the customers is pretty much beside the point.
Some of us more grounded in reality have our eyes on a different Next Big Thing — technology with a low initial investment, although a steep learning curve. It’s called smoke signals. Talk about Next Generation.
“PHONE WALL” by Shiyang he is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0
You got it. Bang on. And I designed and built the earliest versions of the municipal level broadband networks that supported the infrastructure nodes.
A solution without a problem – except declining profit margins. Peak Telecom?
Thanks. It’s always good to hear from someone who knows more about the subject than I ever will.
“… the fact that it’s not working for the customers is pretty much beside the point.”
Bingo!
I believe it was back in the sixties when the issue of ‘accessibility’ first broke loose on the public. Round-the-clock television broadcasting began at about that time, I guess to placate the night-owl viewers. So-called ‘blue laws – state and local ordinances restricting most retail businesses from operating on Sundays – were lifted, fazed out or openly flouted; this to allow the ‘consumer’ (a word nascent in the vernacular of the time) to have ‘access’ to shopping seven days a week. Some stores threw open their doors 24-7…It was all about access.
When the computer revolution hit, websites, browsers and such paid no regard to the clock or calendar at all. Mobile devices then appeared, I guess to keep the unwary glued to the screen anytime, anyplace. “After all, what if someone tries to call? What if there’s an emergency? I need to be accessible!”…Do you indeed?
Why does every person and every thing need to be accessible to every other person and every other thing at all times? I know that privacy is dead, but has the very idea of privacy been lost forever?
I want a cellphone which, when you rub its screen, will cause a djinn to appear on the screen who will grant every wish of yours. Is such a cellphone forthcoming?
QUOTE: ***Some of us more grounded in reality have our eyes on a different Next Big Thing — technology with a low initial investment, although a steep learning curve. It’s called smoke signals. Talk about Next Generation.***
My father rode a camel. I drive a car. My son drives a jet plane. His son will ride a camel. :D (Arab (?) saying)
Whenever I read nonsense about operations of the latest technological systems devised by humans I reflect on the fundamental principle that these systems operate on the flow of irreplaceable energy doing positive work while the associated friction does negative work that transforms the irreplaceable materials of the systems to waste.
Yep and like all these telecom innovations completely useless outside of any urban environment (big city). The issue really is bandwith congestion all up and down the whole frequency spectrum, 5G spectrum is all thats left to play with rest are full. Only so many slots on that universal ladder and they are all full now.
I’d be happy for 4G to work or even 3G, that would be a start but hey I am consumer in a small market (read not worth the service) so we don’t get any well nothing reliable and regular.
Blowback comes when all these useless corporations have gone to robo calling customer service systems but they don’t give a number and don’t leave a message and there is nobody given a name to call or an address to write to – working real well for me I don’t answer the calls, I don’t know who called they don’t write and we get along just fine now, they get the response they deserve – zilch!. I think I am well and truly in the don’t give a sh!t mode with all this.
“Hundreds of scientists and researchers in 40 countries believe that the saturation of high frequency RF required by 5G networks will be as harmful to human health as exposure to asbestos and arsenic.”
some people also BELIEVE:
persistent contrails are nefarious “chemtrails”
the moon landings were faked
smart meters are dangerous
the oroville dam is about to fail
solar pv & wind electric are “renewable”
the earth is flat
there are no limits to growth on our finite planet
smh
Not sure what your point is here, but the scientists referred to are legitimate, as is the concern over the effects of ever-more-numerous electromagnetic fields.
Oh ! … how wonderfully spoiled we’ll be !
A terrific Grande Finale — The Boundless Requirements of the Consumption Economy VS The Law of Diminishing Returns !
Fuck the Super Bowl — I wan’t my entertainment to induce laughter and facepalms in equal measure !
What a time to be alive ! … I think.
I feel the urge to dredge up Thoreau’s wise words from so long ago, not that there’s any use in it:
“Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”
Maine to Texas: Watch out for them Bushes, they’re a-commin’ yer way.
That, at least, would have been a useful purpose for the telegraph. But I get your point.
When I landed in Venezuela over 25 years ago I knew enough Spanish to order a beer (or two). It would be wonderful I thought if I could learn Spanish and then I would know what they are saying. I did learn Spanish and mostly all I heard was the same useless small talk and BS that I would get in English. Same crap, different channel.
“It will be just the thing for the increasing number of people who feel the urge, several times a day, to whip out their phones and talk to their toasters.” TL
That one gave me a full body smile! Thank you.
Tom the main point you make is the most pertinent, the 5G stuff is completely unnecessary in terms of functionality and is really just another bit of technomania.
Some of us just want a telephone, not a wristband supercomputer full of crap. 3G or its predecessor would do just fine. I must be showing my age and biases, just simple and works would do.
I have a little LG flip-open phone – about a decade old. Every 90 days I buy a TracFone card at the drug store for $19.95. It gets me 60 minutes of talk time.* Only my daughter and my girlfriend have the number – none of my clients. I rarely use it, but I carry it in case of emergency (no pay phones).
I spend large, luscious spans of time inaccessible. Some things are a matter of choice.
*I’ve accumulated 1,072 minutes – enough time to converse for 18 hours!
Yep, that’s why I’ve had the same twenty-dollar “dumb” flip-phone for about six years now. (It would be eight and a half, except the first flip-phone I bought was so poorly made that it broke into two pieces at one point. The one I have now has a more durable construction.) And even that device can do many more things than the original cell-phones that went for $300 a pop back in 1993.