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posted by martyb on Saturday August 24 2019, @07:32AM   Printer-friendly
from the "wave"-goodbye dept.

The organization Citizens Against Government Waste reports that federal government agencies are setting up roadblocks that could prevent the US from winning the global race to 5G.

[...] The Departments of Commerce, Defense, Education, and Transportation have filed objections to various proposals by the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) to repurpose federal spectrum for 5G, all of which will slow down progress and effectively give an advantage to other countries like China.

Not only have the four federal agencies lost sight of the importance of achieving 5G dominance, they are also choosing to ignore a 2012 law that authorized clearing certain portions of federal spectrum to allow the FCC to re-allocate and auction it for commercial use. Indeed, they are making some absurd claims about what will happen if they no longer have the use of some or all of their spectrum. The Department of Commerce has said that relinquishing spectrum used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric would cost lives because it would reduce the ability to forecast the weather; the Department of Defense is hiding behind national security and refusing to share anything; the Department of Education is claiming that children will lose access to educational spectrum while the current use of that spectrum is under the FCC's scrutiny for possible abuse; and the Department of Transportation (DOT) is also talking about how the use of spectrum under its control would save lives.

The DOT-held spectrum at 5.9 GHz was allocated to the department in 2009 to be used solely for dedicated short-range communications (DSRC), which has to date has been deployed in very few vehicles. Advocates for retaining the spectrum at DOT are now promoting a different technology that has yet to be adequately tested and may not be widely available for 8-10 years. At the same time, proven technology that increases passenger safety being used in vehicles today includes automatic emergency braking, backup cameras, blind-spot warning, electronic stability control, forward collision warning, lane departure warning and lane keeping systems, light detection and ranging (LIDAR), rear automatic braking, and rear cross-traffic alerts. These systems are radar or laser-based, meaning they have been developed without the need for the 5.9 GHz spectrum.

LINK: https://www.cagw.org/thewastewatcher/federal-spectrum-turf-war-could-hand-5g-victory-china


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by EJ on Saturday August 24 2019, @07:40AM (16 children)

    by EJ (2452) on Saturday August 24 2019, @07:40AM (#884617)

    5G is stupid to begin with. It takes too much power. It takes too many resources (so many more nodes need to be placed due to signal attenuation). It doesn't serve a useful purpose to be able to use up your entire month's data cap in ten seconds. It puts out much higher power EM radiation than what we are already exposed to, which still has some suggesting harmful health effects.

    We have no idea what effect this will have on the environment, insects, birds, etc. It's just another stupid bit of marketing nonsense to get us to toss out our perfectly good phones to "upgrade" to something new that we don't need.

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @08:33AM (6 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @08:33AM (#884626)

    Both are fucking retarded, but the latter is even worse. I am in one of the rollout towns for 5G fixed emplacement internet. They required a cell tower on *EVERY LIGHT POLE* down the streets of the coverage area.

    Literally the only benefit to this over hardlining is that they can now wirelessly track anyone with a 5g cellphone to within a few centimeters of their position for identification on surveillance cameras (of which the same area has been seeing an increasing number each time the traffic light poles are 'updated'.)

    The only purpose of 5g is the same as the purpose of dozens of cameras at every intersection: pervasive long term surveillance of the populace. Not traffic violation deterrence, not safety of the citizens. Long term documentation of the oblivious citizens movements, and comprehensive documentation of their actions until every citizen's actions can be predicted and accounted for, and those whose actions cannot, will be hammered into place or removed like a stuck out nail.)

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @09:48AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @09:48AM (#884651)

      What effects will the radiation have on people around town?

      Why every pole?

      OMFG that's an expensive rollout.

      • (Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday August 24 2019, @09:55AM

        by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Saturday August 24 2019, @09:55AM (#884655) Journal

        https://spectrumfutures.org/what-will-5g-cost/ [spectrumfutures.org]

        Others might not agree. Indeed, some argue 5G costs [blogspot.com] might well be lower than 4G, or might come at a slight premium. There are many reasons.

        Small cells might only be needed in dense urban cores. Open source network elements, virtualization, better radios, use of unlicensed and shared spectrum or shared infrastructure will change the cost curve.

        And small cells cost an order of magnitude less than macrocells. They might eventually, in volume, cost two orders of magnitude less.

        Korea Telecom says that, in its 5G deployment to support the recent Olympic games, the use of 28-GHz spectrum required small cells [blogspot.com]. KT says that, compared to 4G, that meant four times the number of cells.

        That might shock some, but that corresponds to a reduction of 50-percent in the cell radius of a 4G macrocell. Mobile operators are well aware of the cell geometry impact of reducing cell size, so the four-fold increase in number of cells arguably is a pleasant surprise.

        That increase in cells means the cell transmitting radius was reduced just 50 percent from 4G deployments using frequencies far lower in the spectrum range. Many would guess that, in urban deployments, cell radii might have to shrink far more than that, which would increase the number of cells four-fold for every additional 50-percent reduction in cell radius.

        The point is that, in the 5G era, mobile operators will have worked quite hard to bend the cost curve, meaning that our old assumptions about infrastructure cost will have to be revised lower.

        It is not at all clear that 5G will cost multiples of 4G, double 4G or even 60 percent more than 4G, which is a range of casual thinking about 5G infrastructure costs.

        --
        [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @10:46AM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @10:46AM (#884668)

      In terms of tracking, it's already too late.

      Why?

      Think of satellites. In 1984, it was well known that license plates could be read by US entities, via satellite. Further, they could ... once acquired, track people via satellite.

      That was *thirty five* years ago. 35 years!!!! Think on that. THIRTY FIVE YEARS.

      Now, it is known such satellites can see through cloud, and at night. And since greater detail isn't really required, what comes next? Greater scope. So for starters, I'm going to say that every single inch of US soil is monitored 24x7 by satellite. In other words, top-down camera surveillance is already 100%, and has been for probably at least 15 years.

      And it is very easy to re-acquire a person after they've been in a building for a while Gait tracking (you didn't think the chinese thought of that first, did you?), size/weight/gender of person. So, even if you enter a building, certainly you'll be re-linked to your ID soon after emergence. Even if it takes 20 minutes to re-link "you with you", they merely have to go back through stored video to track you back to the start.

      The only limits here, is storage space... and if anyone has it, it's the US government.

      So:

      - 100% coverage to .2m at least, night, day, through clouds
      - continual recording and storing of the entire US at that fidelity
      - computerized tracking of every single person, constantly re-linking lost entities
      - immense storage and computational power

      I'd say the biggest limit is computational power. But if anyone can throw money at such things, it's the US gov. And really, even if tracking 300M + people is a problem, computationally, you can still store everything, and then track ONE person back through time.

      So stop worrying about street cameras. They're only for municipalities to track you.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @11:16PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @11:16PM (#885414)

        Then why do police have such a hard time finding criminals ?

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Saturday August 24 2019, @01:02PM

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Saturday August 24 2019, @01:02PM (#884703) Journal

      802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6) is more interesting to me than 5G.

      5G isn't necessarily at 60 GHz, and it's all over the place including near 5 GHz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G#New_radio_frequencies [wikipedia.org]

      802.11ay (WiGig 2?) is 60 GHz. That could be useful for replacing wires indoors, transmitting VR graphics to an untethered headset, etc.

      --
      [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @09:29AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @09:29AM (#884640)

    Seconded. 4G is 'good enough'. Why rush to market when the existing systems will tide us over?
    Do we have another Dialip - ISDN - DSL - Fibre situation?

    • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Saturday August 24 2019, @03:42PM

      by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Saturday August 24 2019, @03:42PM (#884782) Journal

      It's the stupid social media mentality - gawd forbid you miss a millisecond of what some person you would not give the time of day to in real life is doing, so that you can like it so they can like you back and the mutual emotional masturbation circle jerk continues ...

      I've been doing some research (at least that's what I'm calling it) into access for people with visual limitations, and neither Facebook nor Twitter, nor many of blogging platforms, allows you to register using a text-only browser such as "links" or "lynx."

      This is deplatforming of the visually handicapped, and has both positive and negative consequences. One of the positives is "who the fsck needs their shit anyway?"

      On the negative side, just because you're limited in your abilities doesn't mean that you should be denied equal access to such things as networking for job opportunities, and finding others in the same boat. Ditto for lobbying for change. Activism can't be done in a vacuum.

      But here's an experiment - go to a site using a text-only browser, and one using a GUI. Notice how much faster text-only loads ("well, duh!" you say).

      But look at what you're not loading. Javascript includes for all sorts of tracking, images for all sorts of tracking, web bugs for all sorts of tracking ... I think you see the pattern. Bonus for no css style sheets, no images whatsoever, no videos (even with autoplay off a lot of them do pre-fetch), no worrying that you're hitting 100 or more different servers on every page load.

      One of the funny things I found was JavaScript attempting to load a visual captcha ("click on the pictures that show bridges") that failed because they loaded a graphic image to click on if you wanted to use an audio captcha. Nothing in the block rendered in text, so the registration failed with a "failed captcha test", and I'm scratching my head thinking "what, where, did they even test this shit?"

      THAT is privacy. And 4g supports that with no problems, since you're using 1% or less of the bandwidth Chrome, Firefox, or Safari use in the same circumstance.

      In terms of bandwidth usage, a picture "is worth" (consumes) far more than 1,000 words. Google, Facebook, and the rest of the usual suspects need 5g to further advance their business models - we don't.

      --
      SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Saturday August 24 2019, @02:22PM (1 child)

    by jmichaelhudsondotnet (8122) on Saturday August 24 2019, @02:22PM (#884744) Journal

    Well said, we can be friends.

    I also like to point out that we don't know whether it can be weaponized or not, like with that many nodes what will happen if they all focus on one person's eyeballs? Or a city block's eyeballs?

    This could be a population control weapon in disguise, for all we know from their reports of operation in ideal conditions.

    And anything powerful people right now, the same ones who let epstein run free since 1997, are really excited about a new tech, then I am just not going to be excited about it, period.

    We need seawalls, and renewable energy, and credible instititutions, and flints water pipes, but this problem with wireles data transmission was solved with 4g.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @06:53PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @06:53PM (#884860)

      exactly. track everyone completely while killing them. no more resistance to tyranny, population problems or social security checks. double plus good.

  • (Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Saturday August 24 2019, @03:57PM (1 child)

    by fustakrakich (6150) on Saturday August 24 2019, @03:57PM (#884792) Journal

    *Who's gonna stop 'em?*

    --
    La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Acabatag on Saturday August 24 2019, @04:25PM

      by Acabatag (2885) on Saturday August 24 2019, @04:25PM (#884804)

      The people who expect payment for installing and maintaining antennas on every light post.

  • (Score: 2) by exaeta on Saturday August 24 2019, @09:35PM (1 child)

    by exaeta (6957) on Saturday August 24 2019, @09:35PM (#884910) Homepage Journal

    5GHz is still safe.
    5.9 is still safe.

    Any radio frequency is safe, radiation doesn't become ionizing until ultraviolet.

    --
    The Government is a Bird
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @12:00PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @12:00PM (#885147)

      Spend some time in a microwave oven.

  • (Score: 2) by sonamchauhan on Saturday August 24 2019, @11:13PM

    by sonamchauhan (6546) Subscriber Badge on Saturday August 24 2019, @11:13PM (#884957)

    Correct. The best reason I can guess for 5G is the phone company trying to grab the ISP market.