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Mill Valley joins effort to constrain 5G proliferation
The city of Mill Valley has enacted an urgency ordinance to regulate "small cell" towers amid concerns that cellphone companies want to grow their 5G networks and install new equipment in Marin. "We do intend to do more work and studies to craft a permanent ordinance within the next year," Mill Valley Mayor Stephanie Moulton-Peters said Friday. "The urgency ordinance has standards to limit and prohibit the installations of devices in residential neighborhoods, but there is more that we can do."
The decision came on a unanimous vote by the City Council on Thursday, after residents from across Marin packed the council chambers as part of a campaign urging local officials to block cellphone companies from attempting to build 5G towers in the county. No proposals for 5G towers have been submitted to Mill Valley, staff said.
The issue is that 5G towers, which would allow for faster and higher-capacity video streaming and other transmissions, could exacerbate health symptoms already suspected as a result of exposure to electromagnetic fields, according to the EMF Safety Network, a group advocating to keep communities EMF-free. Those symptoms can include fatigue, headaches, sleep problems, anxiety, heart problems, learning and memory disorders, ringing in the ears and increased cancer risk, according to the EMF Safety Network website.
"What 5G does is it adds another cloud to what we refer to as 'electromagnetic smog' into an environment that is already pretty saturated," said Fairfax resident and activist Valeri Hood. "In Fairfax, what we're doing is asking our council to step up in the way councils have in the past, and just say no to 5G."
Also at HardOCP.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Tuesday September 11 2018, @09:11PM (13 children)
Shouldn't this be exclusively within the domain of the FCC?
What if every city, county, state, etc thought it could regulate or restrict certain kinds of radio spectrum transmissions?
While a city may want to act to protect safety, it is the government's job to create regulations, taxes, red tape, new branches of government and bureaucracy. The feds can do this on a much more massive scale than any city could ever hope. So leave bureaucracy to those who know how to do it best. There is no problem so big it cannot be solved by adding more government regulation or taxes or both.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday September 11 2018, @09:13PM (9 children)
They can do whatever they want. The federal court(s) can sort it out later.
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(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday September 11 2018, @09:17PM (8 children)
That answer doesn't really help a company wanting to erect a 5G cellphone tower.
Customers will demand 5G! Because it's better. You can tell because of the 5. It must be better. Customers will know it's better because the TV told them.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday September 11 2018, @09:31PM (5 children)
As long as this doesn't become a movement that spreads to many cities, they can just ignore Mill Valley. The 5G rollout will probably take years anyway, focusing on metropolitan areas first, and the base stations will have a short range. So you just ignore the 12 km2 of Mill Valley [wikipedia.org], and probably the surrounding areas as well.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/video/telecom/wireless/everything-you-need-to-know-about-5g [ieee.org]
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(Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Tuesday September 11 2018, @09:52PM
Maybe you just ignore Mill Valley forever and ever. Do your safety studies. We'll be back to check on your progress in one quarter of a galactic rotation.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 12 2018, @02:07AM (3 children)
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday September 12 2018, @02:58PM (2 children)
It does existing things faster. But often that also means more capacity.
I don't need 10 GB ethernet to my computer. So why does it exist? For the same reason that six lane highways exist in some places. Or the 404 (and I don't mean page not found).
I hear that 5G has poor in building penetration.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday September 13 2018, @01:44AM
https://www.cio.com/article/3226451/networking/5g-a-few-frequency-facts.html [cio.com]
Yes, but improvements in other parts of the spectrum could help. And if you are close to a 5G base station, you can get the promised crazy speeds.
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(Score: 1) by exaeta on Thursday September 13 2018, @09:07PM
Yes. In general, higher frequency means more bandwidth but lower material penetration*. It's why you can transmit data to/from underground on the lower frequency bands, but you'd be lucky to get a few KiB/s doing so.
* (This is technically not true of very very high frequencies, e.g. gamma rays penetrate better than visible light, but I'm going to assume you're still in the radio bands given that transmitting data via gamma radiation or X-rays might pose issues for the general wellbeing of the population. Basically, the closer EM-radiation frequency becomes to visible light, the poorer the penetration will become.)
The Government is a Bird
(Score: 2) by Fluffeh on Wednesday September 12 2018, @02:56AM (1 child)
1) Just get some 5G stickers.
2) Pop them over the 4G stickers you see on cell towers.
3) Get the users to "install special 5G app to get best speeds!" (App merely makes phone display 5G instead of 4G)
4) PROFIT
No missing steps. Winner. Right there.
I'll be happy to take a mere 5% cut of new revenues in this glorious and cunning plan as it is brought to fruition.
*sips coffee*
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday September 12 2018, @02:59PM
I hope you patented this.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Tuesday September 11 2018, @09:27PM (2 children)
I would think they could. If they don't claim to regulate the EMF spectrum, they can simply deny phone companies permission to build any towers.
"Oh no, you can have all the 5G you want, that's under the FCC's control. Hmm build a tower you say, no no I don't think that fits in with our civic planning scheme. Permission denied"
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday September 11 2018, @09:55PM
If a cell phone company (and I can't imagine ever being on their side, but anyway . . .) could prove that was why the city was obstructing their cell towers, that could be a spectacular lawsuit.
If a city were just being obnoxious about not allowing cell towers, then don't install them, and let the people in that area suffer. You may lose customers, but they can't go to any of your competitors for the same service either. So they may have no incentive to leave. After all, it's not just you, but NO provider would be rolling out 5G in such a city.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Wednesday September 12 2018, @06:30AM
Cities can't do much to regulate Ham Radio operator's antennas, they are under Federal jurisdiction. If the Feds will pull a jurisdiction override for that, seriously doubt the Feds will roll over and let these locals regulate cell towers when there is real money on the table. Money talks and hippies will have to fume. Probably can get a Federal Judge to issue a TRO, it is the 9th Circus, but it won't last past the first appeal since it is pretty settled law.
It is all pointless anyway. The story of RF in the past Century has been reducing power and sliding most activity ever upward in frequency and reducing the typical range of transmission. A few TV stations still belch megawatts to cover entire cities but those are dying off. Broadcast radio is dying. Cell towers are moving closer together as the range of each generation of radio shrinks as part of the ramp up in bandwidth. A cellphone's transmit power is puny and shrinking. The first big bulky luggable cell phones could pump out 3W in the UHF band, the handheld ones dropped to 0.6W max and it just keeps dropping and now generally operate in the microwave bands like WiFi. We now utilize the whole SNR of a chunk of spectrum and spot beam it. The days of ET listening to our transmission is quickly ending, somebody a mile from the intended reception point can't receive it. Literally, the signal is below the noise threshold without extreme antenna systems.
This 5G rollout takes all this up another notch, very short ranges to allow more spectrum reuse, even lower transmit power for better battery life on mobile devices, etc. And the frequency is jacked up another notch as well, at the rate they are going they will be hitting the hard limit and have to stop because it doesn't penetrate things.