5G Myths vs Reality

painstakingly slow rollout. But since then there's been a lot of weird misinformation related to what five G is and what it does and what it can do, and so I figured it would be good to revisit the topic and try to clear some stuff up. There are some myths and misconceptions that we need to address, and some of this is due to questionable marketing decisions from various companies. Some of it has to do with magical thinking, and some of it I can't explain from a psychological standpoint.

So let's begin with a rundown of what the G means here. As I mentioned it, it means generation, as in the fifth generation of mobile network technologies that allow for the wireless transmission of information, including voice communications and these days stuff like Internet surfing and all the data you need for all those apps that are on your phone. But it's good to remember that we're talking about families of technologies. Five G isn't like a single unified technological implementation,

which kind of already makes it confusing. So the first generation of mobile network technologies was analog, not digital, and it allowed for voice calls, but you couldn't even send text over this network. The technology also had some pretty big limitations to it, including a lack of a liable form of security, so it was possible to snoop on

calls if you knew what you were doing. There was also a problem with stuff like interference from other radio signals, which ties into another topic, that of setting aside certain bands of radio frequencies for specific uses. Well, touch on

that again later. Uh, if you don't do that, if you don't set aside specific bands for specific purposes, then any company could make any device that transmits and receives on any given radio frequency, and then you would quickly enter into a situation where interference would be a big problem, like if your emergency services radio signals are on the same channel frequencies as television, that would be terrible. The original cellular technologies were emerging in the late nineties seventies,

but they stuck around until the early nine nineties. Really we wouldn't refer to them as one G technologies except in reet respect. In around ninety one, we saw digital technologies take over for analog and thus we saw the introduction of two G mobile networks, which allowed for texting. Technically, you could also do stuff like send pictures, you know, multi media messaging, but it was a pretty low data throughput,

so doing that would take a while. It took a while to upload and then download over these uh these specifications. There were some incremental improvements of the underlying technologies in the second generations. So sometimes you'll hear about specific implementations being referred to as two point five G or two point seven five G really meaning a more advanced version of two G technology, but not transformational enough to necessitate

a brand new number. And we saw a couple of different versions of two G and they were not compatible with each other. There was more than a couple, but two of them would end up really taking hold, and those were G S M and C d M A. So we kind of had a forking path of mobile networking technologies for a while. Both implementations met the standards for two G service. In other words, they both were able to do what two G was specified as doing.

Most of the specifications were largely defined with data throughput speeds and the supported services that the technology should be able to handle. But it also illustrated that when we talk in g S, we don't necessarily mean a unified, you know, monolithic approach. If you had a C d M A phone and you traveled to a place that only had G S M service like a GSM network, you would discover that your phone just didn't work on

those networks, and vice versa. If you had a G S M phone and you went to a place that only had C d M A service, you'd be out of lock. Now you could find phones that had chips in them, uh SIM chips that would make them compatible with both, but they were the exception, not the rule, and they tended to be very expensive. The subsequent generations saw new transmission standards that would allow for larger data

transfers per unit of time. Now we typically refer to that as speed, but the speed is kind of like speed is tricky. You're really talking about the data moving at the same speed as just that you could transport larger chunks at a time. So instead of it thinking of it as um faster, think of it as just more more through put. Uh So we often refer to it just as you know, each generation is faster than

previous generations. What we really mean is we don't have to wait as long for stuff to happen, And in four G we would see some additional services introduced on top of the ones that were already supported by the earlier generations. Also, the move to the LTE standard in four G brought those forking paths of d M A and g s M kind of back together. It was a globally agreed upon standard, although not everyone was using

the same radio frequency bands. So while technically the standard would be the same from country to country, you could still have a phone not work if you were to travel to a different country just because if your phone antenna did not support the radio frequencies that were being used by the country's network, you still wouldn't have service.

For a while, phones were still you know, needing the older C d M A and GSM networks for the purposes of voice calls because originally four G mobile carriers didn't have four J support voice over for G it's kind of crazy, but it did come around, so that would ultimately lead to the the potential to phase out G S M and C D M A. And I think there's a general tendency one that I I myself had found myself falling into to go a spinal tap on these kind of things. By that, I mean the

movie Spinal Tap. For those who don't know what I mean by this, there's a scene in a mockumentary comedy film called This Is Spinal Tap. It follows a fictional heavy metal band, and in one iconic scene in particular, there's a character named Nigel who is showing off his beloved amplifier, which, as he points out, has dials that go up to eleven rather than the standard ten. And

Nigel's point is that these go to eleven. It seems to indicate that because the number on the dial is larger than ten, it must therefore be louder than amplifiers that go up to ten. But obviously you really can just make ten louder. You can make a louder amplifier and still have ten b the top number, and you just change the scale because there's no meaningful advantage to having an eleven on a dial because there's no universal standard for what each increment of amplifier means. From a

louder perspective, there's no universal approach to this. You know, you can just put a sticker on an amplifier and change a dial that went from one to tend to one to eleven. You've just changed the scale a little bit. Well, with tech in general, we tend to have these expectations that with each subsequent generation, with each number of a technology, the most recent number will be more powerful than the

previous ones. And it's like engineers have taken the old way of doing things and just made it, you know, more better, or something like it's the same technology as before, only now it can do what the old technology did, but faster and with more power. But that is not always the way things work, and particularly with wireless data transmissions, it's not necessarily true. Complicating this is that there are other factors that can affect your data throughput no matter

what g you happen to be using. Stuff like the number of people who are using that particular network spot, or how far away you are from the transmission antenna, or what the signal to noise ratio is for that particular network. You know, if there are a lot of people watching I don't know, four K streams of the Mandalorian on their phones, which would be weird because I mean, who needs the four K resolution of that screen size? But anyway, well, that much traffic is going to be

a factor. It's going to start overwhelming the network. Or if you're at the very edge of a service area, that could affect you too. And if both factors are in play, you know you're at the very edge of a service area and everybody else is watching the Mandalorian in four K, you might feel like your technology is actually taken a step backward. You might feel like, wow, this is slower than my old phone. Now. Don't get me wrong, the differences between one generation of wireless tech

and the next can be significant. They can involve new ways to encode and transmit information, but sometimes that means that, at least initially, you might not actually see an improvement when it comes to data throughput. Further, depending on the standard, the number of people on a network can really make a big difference to the quality of service that each person receives. And it also helps to remember that generations are not bordered by hard and fast beginning and ending points.

They bleed into each other. Typically there's a lot of overlap between one generation and the next. I mean major operators in the United States kept that old two G network active up until twenty so there can even be overlap between a current generation and two or three generations of technology that came earlier. And we can have situations where say a three G transmission is you know, faster and more reliable than a four G you know, or an LTE transmission. And just as I mentioned before, a

network congestion can do that. Right as someone who used to go to really big tech conferences, like when those were still a thing, you know, like C E S, I would off make it a habit to switch my phone manually over to three G service because the four G networks would just be overwhelmed by traffic. Implementations of

these technologies can improve over time. So if you have a late generation three G system and hand set and you were to compare that against an early generation four G LTE system and phone, the three G setup might

actually have better performance than the LT version. So the three G phone on the three G network might have better performance than the four G phone on the four G network, you know, only because the three G one occurred late in the life cycle when a lot of advances had been made, and the four G came early in that generation cycle before those improvements were made, and

on the surface, again seem counterintuitive. Again, four is bigger than three, so it should be faster, and ultimately it got there, but doesn't mean that it's like that round

the gate. We're seeing some of that with five G rollout as well, which I'm sure it comes as a frustration for some customers, and it doesn't help that there's been some confusion, some of it purposefully promoted about what does and doesn't qualify as actual five G. The organization that determines what is five G is the International Telecommunication Union or i TU. In the i TU announced its specs for the technical requirements for five G radio interfaces.

Those specifications were more focused on what the five G should be able to do, which included stuff like the five G cell itself that is the network connection point for devices like a cell tower kind of thing, and that these should have at least twenty gigabits per second download capacity at minimum, so it should be able to support twenty billion bits per second of downloading at minimum, and it also should be able to support again at minimum ten gigabits per second of upload speed to the

network at large from each five G connection tower. Now that does not mean that if your cellular service provider rolls out a robust five G network, you would be able to pull down twenty gigabits per second and download speed on your phone. If you could, that would be

I mean, that would be amazing. But no, this spec calls for a user download speed of at least one hundred megabits per second and an upload of fifty megabits per second, which is pretty darn close to what you can get with four G LTE on a good day. And it's also good to remember that, depending on conditions, you might not get peak speeds. In fact, it would be pretty rare when you did get the peak performance

out of this technology. Anyone who has tested their home internet connection is probably familiar with this, because speeds are usually below, and sometimes well below the advertised peak performance that you'll see from providers. That's why those little asterisks after a claim in an advertisement are so important. Now, the one D megabits down and fifty megabits up is supposed to be the minimum data throughput for users, so it's not like that that's the peak of five G service. Either.

A good five G network and compatible devices could mean faster filed downloads, lower latency, better streaming services, all due to this increase throughput. But the five G technologies can make use of different bands of wireless frequencies, and that's also going to change things up and make stuff more complicated. In other words, not all five G is equal. There's five G and then there's five G if you get what I mean, and I'll explain more in a minute.

The standard also called for the support of up to one million connected devices per square kilometer of space, So a big part that is due to the proliferation of the Internet of things devices that are putting an increasing strain on networks, and arguably that one million per square kilometer is actually falling behind as far as the Internet of things trend is going, but that's another topic. There are a few other specifications for five G that are important.

One is that latency, that is the delay introduced when transmitting and receiving data, should be at four milliseconds. Maximum LT part of the four G family has a latency of twenty milliseconds or so, and that's important because generally speaking, humans aren't really able to detect a delay less than

twenty milliseconds. And you can see how this would be important for certain applications like augmented reality, where you've got some sort of display that might be mounted in a headset or glasses, or might just be through your phone or whatever, but you need to have digital information overlaying

a view of the physical world around you. For your average application, a short delay might not be much of a problem, but we're starting to see some pretty audacious uses of a R including in amusement park attractions, so reducing latency is an important part of providing a good immersive experience. It doesn't do you any good on a ride, for example, if the information you see in your in your headset is relating back to something that you've already passed, right,

it's not relevant anymore. In addition, for ultra reliable low latency communications otherwise known as you are l l C, the latency should be just one millisecond, which is pretty darn responsive. There are other components to the five G specifications from I TU, but for most of us, they're just the technical bits and bobs that makes our stuff go.

And I think the average consumer just wants that sweet fast connection and they don't really care about things like spectral efficiency, even though it's actually really important for how data will travel on five G frequencies. And we will come back to it, all right, So I mentioned frequency bands earlier, but what does that mean. Well, we got to do a quick rundown on radio waves, which we

will do right after this quick break. So we tend to talk about radio waves in terms of frequency, which is how many radio wave lengths will pass a given point within a second. And this also links back to the actual wave length of the radio wave. All radio waves travel at the same speed. They are electromagnetic information or electromagnetic signals, I should say, so in this case, it's the length of the wave that determines how many of that particular radio wave will pass a given point

in the second. If they're all moving at the same speed, the the length is the only real differentiator that tells us this. So the radio spectrum is a really big one. And as I mentioned earlier, countries set aside specific bands

for specific purposes. Generally speaking, the full radio spectrum that we could use for wireless communication spans from three hurts to three hundred giga hurts, and it hurts is one cycle per second, like one vibration per second, but in the case of radio waves, we think of it as one wavelength per second. So you've got a physical spot like a start line, and it takes one full second for a single wavelength to pass that point. That would be a one hurts radio wave would also be incredibly

long because these things are moving wicked fast. So on the low end of the spectrum that we tend to use for a communication, we have three to thirty hurts. That means you would have three to thirty wavelengths of a radio signal passing a given point in a second, which at three hurts would mean that the wavelength would

be about one hundred thousand kilometers long. This is not easy for us to generate because there's actually a relationship between the length of our radio wave and the length of an antenna that you need to generate it to

transmit that kind of wave. But these extremely low frequencies have a benefit of being able to penetrate water so it makes them useful for stuff like communicating with submarines on the far end of the spectrum, on the opposite side, we have three hundred giga hurts, meaning three hundred billion wavelengths of a radio signal will pass a given point in a second, which means each individual radio wave measures one millimeter long. So what happens if you were to

keep going down the spectrum? What happens if you kept on making the wavelengths shorter and making the frequencies higher, Well, eventually you cross over into other types of electro magnetic energy, including stuff like visible light. When you go far enough, if you keep going, then you hit stuff like X rays and gamma rays. Alright, so the five G wireless frequencies fall into a couple of broad groups, and one of those two we can even split into two subgroups.

So on the low end of the scale, which is often called the sub six giga hurts, we've got the low end at six hundred mega hurts. That means six hundred million wavelengths would pass a given point per second, and all the way up to six giga hurts or

six billion wavelengths past a point in a second. Now, keep in mind that the whole range is not exclusive to five G, just chunks of that range are in five G. For example, there's actually a pretty big gap between twenty six hundred mega hurts and thirty five hundred mega hurts. These frequencies represent the low band and mid band ranges of five G frequencies. Those would be those two subgroups I mentioned earlier, low band being the lower group of frequencies in that chunk, and mid band being

in the higher band of frequencies in that chunk. But we've got a second chunk which consists of much higher frequencies, starting at twenty six giga hurts and ending in the fifty giga hurts range. And again five G does not take up all the frequencies within this range, but chunks of them or sub sections of them. And this is

the high band range of frequencies. So we've got the low band, the mid band, and the high band range of five G. Now it's that high band frequency range that the marketing divisions of various carrier companies have really focused on because it represents the biggest potential impact on consumers. Assuming a robust rollout of five G infrastructure and some special situations. It's in that high band frequent sees where

we see incredible data throughput. One of a T and T S tests of its five G high band technology showed a bandwidth of one point two gigabits per second. That's a similar speed to what you would find with a fiber optic connection. So wicked fast data transfer speeds. That's incredible, right. You would be able to download videos to your phone in a blink of an eye. If you had a five G antenna connected to your home router, then you can use five G to be a substitute

for a fiber optic line direct to your home. You could even download those massive PS five and Xbox Series X games in just a minute or two. But at the lower range of frequencies, you know, the stuff that's in the low to mid band ranges of five G, those are not as impressive when it comes to data throughput. You wouldn't be able to hit that kind of bandwidth. The speeds you would get at those ranges would be closer to what you see with lt E a K

four G speeds. Uh, the low band would be a little faster than four G. The mid band can be significantly faster, just not nearly as fast as the high band stuff. And let's think about how we use radio waves to send information to kind of understand what's going

on here. A radio wave on its own that is a just a steady radio frequency, that's not terribly useful if we want to convey any information, right, Like, imagine you're seeing down to have a conversation with someone like me, and let's just say that I just make a noise like this. Uh, that's not really helpful, right, I mean, some of my critics would say they could barely tell

the difference between that and one of my episodes. Words can hurt, But anyway, without me modulating that sound, without making the phonemes associated with the language, all I'm really able to do with a simple tone like that is to indicate that you know, I'm here, I'm around. So I'm able to make that tone, but that's really it. So to communicate, I have to take that tone, that signal, and I need to alter it in some way. I

could increase the pitch or the frequency. I might change the volume of it or the amplitude in order to distress something. And I can chop up that sound in lots of ways encoding information that you decode. You hear the sound, your brain interprets the sound, and you make meaning from it, which is really cool. Well, radio waves

are kind of similar. We take a radio signal of a particular frequency, that is our carrier signal, and then we have a channel of signals, and we change that channel of signals in little ways to have that carry information. So we can change the amplitude that's what AM radio does. AM stands for amplitude modulation, Or we could change the frequency a little bit, that's what FM radio does. That's frequency modulation, and we could encode information onto the radio

waves themselves that way. Then an antenna of an appropriately tuned receiver can pick up that radio signal and with a decoder, it can change the information back into a form that's useful to us, which is pretty nifty. Now, when we get to wireless communications beyond basic radio signals, we are talking about channels. Here. That carrier signal is

really the foundation to transmit information. But with a channel, we're actually talking about a band of frequencies that are in some way around this carrier signal, and the size of that channel would be the bandwidth that determines how much information that signal can carry, though the encoding process also plays a big part in this, but we don't want to get too deep into encoding. That gets really complicated.

So let's use a very simple example. Let's say you've got a carrier signal at six hundred mega hurts and the channel frequency is too mega hurts. What that means is that you actually have a two mega hurts space around six hundred. So a simple way of doing this would be to say that from five to six hundred and one mega hurts, that's where the channel sits, and six hundred is right smack dab in the middle, and it's that that channel with that gives you your data

carrying capacity. Now let's get into that spectral efficiency thing that I mentioned earlier in this episode. It's a good time to sort of explain what that actually means. And first, here's what it doesn't mean. I was very sad to discover that spectral efficiency has nothing to do with how effective ghosts are at haunting someplace. I mean, come on, that's where my mind went. But ghosts aren't real, So I guess that's a strike against that idea. In the

first place. So spectral efficiency has to do with how much information can fit into a given channel bandwidth, how well can that part of the radio spectrum that that channel transmit information? How effective is it and carrying info well. Spectral efficiency tells us more about how much information we can encode onto a given frequency channel. We typically talk about in terms of the number of bits per second

per hurts. So it's a net data rate per second or bits per second divided by the channel bandwidth and hurts. And again we're not talking about the specific radio frequency here, so we wouldn't be saying six hundred mega hurts. We're talking about how wide is that channel? How wide does that bandwidth? And that can be anywhere on the radio frequency, So how big is the range of frequencies within that channel.

Wider channels can carry more information, kind of like if you have a highway that has more lanes, more cars can fit on that span of highway at a single time. So while the base frequency for a five G connection might be six center mega hurts, the channel with could be anything. Let's say that it could be like thirty mega hurts. Well, that's what we're concerned with the channel with the thirty mega hurts, not what frequency it's actually

transmitted on. That doesn't really matter. Let's take an example to really understand this. I pulled this example, by the way, from tech play on dot com. They actually have a really useful rundown on what spectral efficiency is, and in their example, we have the following. We've got a fifteen megabits per second raw data rate on a channel bandwidth,

and the channel bandwidth is two mega hurts. Now, that raw data rate is not what a user would actually get to take advantage of for the purposes of doing something like download a file, because you have to have a certain amount of the bandwidth reserved for what's called overhead, just you know, have things work. So in this case, this particular approach reserves two megabits per second as overhead, so really you only have access to thirteen megabits per second.

If this sounds familiar to you, you're probably thinking about things like storage space. You'll be told like a hard drive can hold a terabyte of information, but it turns out it's more like eight hundred gigabytes of information. Same sort of thing. So in this particular example, using the bits per second per hurts, we would say we've got thirteen megabits per second, which would be thirteen million bits per second, and then we would have to divide that

by two mega hurts or two million hurts. That would give us six point five bits per second per hurts, which describes the spectral efficiency of this hypothetical signal. Now, remember we were talking about a channel with a width of two mega hurts, and I didn't talk about the

actual frequency of the signal because that's not important. If the if the frequency was twenty six hundred mega hurts and not six center mega hurts, it would still be the same amount of information being carried on this signal, because again it's the channel width that range of frequencies that's what's important. How why does that channel how much capacity are we talking about here to hold data, not

the frequency of the carrier signal. So in the lower group of frequencies for five G, the channel width is narrower, with most of them being around forty mega hurts wide or or smaller. Uh, there's lots of other stuff that's taking up bands of frequencies around this range. So in other words, you need to have enough channels so that all the different carriers can operate without them interfering with

each other. But they can't be too wide because you you've got to reserve some of that radio frequency space for other stuff. So by necessity, there's a limit to how wide those channels can get, which means there's a limit to how much information they can carry. Uh. When you start getting further up in the frequencies, there's a little more room to work with, so the channels can be more wide or wider at those higher frequencies, with channels that are a hundred mega hurts wide, so they

can actually carry more information per second. There's a lot more to it than all of this, but it if you think it's complicated now, it gets really Matthew after that, and I'm worried that I would not explain it properly. So rather than make things more confusing, let's leave off with the understanding that the low and mid band five gen networks will offer modest, too good improvements in wireless

data speeds, but nothing approaching fiber optics speeds. The high band can hit fiber optics speeds, So that leads you to a question, why wouldn't you just go all in with the high band? Why would you even bother with low band or mid band. Well, there are a couple of answers that question. One of them is that the transmission range for those higher frequencies is much shorter than

for the low and midband frequencies. And we're talking about like a thousand feet or less from the transmission tower, which means you would need high band five G antennas everywhere to provide comprehensive coverage. If you didn't, well, you wouldn't be able to take advantage of those super fast

speeds at any place within a given region. Like you might only be able to hit it at a specific street corner, but if you go a block in any direction, suddenly that connection just drops on top of the limited range. The higher frequencies have really poor penetration, so it's hard for them to get to pass through stuff like walls

or you know, foliage. So if you've got a wall between you and a transmitter, or you know you're just in a you know, wooded area inside a park, let's say at a city, you might not be able to get a very good, saynal from those high band transmitters, so you wouldn't be able to take advantage of those those speeds, the low and midband frequencies at five G, they have better range and they have better penetration, so you don't need as many antennas for low range or

low band and mid band frequencies. Uh. And when you have them, you can actually have people still get a signal if they were to be inside, assuming you're not too far away from whatever the closest transmitters are. So the high band five G transmitters will provide the most incredible jumps and performance, but the availability of the signal

will be relatively low. The low band stuff will provide a you know, a modest improvement over four G speeds, but it could be available pretty much everywhere with just a relatively few number of cell towers. Compared to the high band stuff, that mid band is kind of in the sweet spot. Uh. Your typical data speed would be greater than what we see with four G by you know, a decent amount, but it wouldn't be as impressive as that high band range where you're getting the gigabit per

second speeds. Anyway, based on a lot of the marketing for five G, you would never know that the speeds they talk about are something you would only experience if you happen to be in a transmitter dense environment and outdoors to boot. It's the sort of thing you might experience if you are in a dense urban setting, you know, a city that has enough people in it to justify the expense of rolling out a high band five G

infrastructure all over the ding dang during place. And if you have a building between you and the closest transmitter, you're not likely to get a good signal. So the reality of five G is a little less exciting than

the marketing materials would necessarily have us believe. Though, if you do happen to find yourself in the situation where you've got a clear line of sight on a high band five G transmitter, like let's say that for some reason they build one that happens to be like a bee line right into your living room, Well you've got you're gonna have blazing fast wireless communication connections in that case,

if you've got compatible technologies to use with it. That's also why, again five companies are talking about using five G as a replacement for stuff like fiber connections to homes, because it's way easier to provide that kind of speed to a home if the home has an antenna. And that's because, with very few exceptions, homes don't move around

very much. So you can establish a line of sight between a home antenna and a transmission antenna and you can be fairly sure that's not going to change over time. But people with a cell phone, you know, people move around a lot the jerks. Alright, So five speeds have the potential to give us access to incredible data transfer speeds under certain circumstances, but otherwise we'll see a more

modest improvement over what we have today. When we come back, we'll talk about some of the conspiracies and misconceptions around five G. But first let's take another quick break. When it comes to misinformation, misunderstanding, and misrepresentation, I am not sure I have seen another technology as prone to that kind of stuff. Is five G at least not a legitimate technology. There are a lot of hoaxes out there.

They could probably give five G a run for its money, but you know, that's a that's a different kettle of fish. Some of this comes down to marketing, and as I've already mentioned, that is a big issue. Companies pushing five G like it's a fiber optic connection wherever you might be.

That's misleading, it's not really accurate. Given the range and penetration limitations of millimeter wave five G transmissions, that high band we were talking about, you're just not likely to experience those speeds unless you're in a city that you happen to be outside, and you are close to one of those transmitters, and you've got a compatible device that runs on the network that happens to be in that area. This is what we would call conditional love. It's really

really conditional. Now that's not to say that low and mid range five G speeds will be bad. They won't be bad. They'll be good. They just won't be as transformational as the advertising would have you think. But there are other complications here. For example, A T and T S five G E. Why all right, this one is hard for me to cover without getting snarky about it, because it's very hard for me to see how this is anything other than misinformation. But let's cover what actually happened.

So back in early twenty nineteen, some A, T and D customers saw an interesting icon pop up on their phones, and the icon said five G E and These were the very same phones that one day earlier were humble four G phones LTE phones, and overnight, boom, they go to five G, which is incredible. How did that happen? Well,

it happened by not happening. See, I didn't go five gen because five G E or five G evolution is what a T and T calls four G L T E. Now granted it is four G L T E with the late generation advances like the four by four M I M O and T five six Q A M and No, I'm not going to explain these things because

it would take another episode to do it. The important thing to know is that these were advanced as were made, and how we take advantage of four G networks, how we encode information to transmit across four G technology, which allowed for better connectivity and faster data transfer rates. So this is that late stage generational stuff that I alluded to at the beginning of this episode. It's what we

were seeing with the four G networks. And in fact, T Mobile had rolled out the same sort of technology and its networks three years earlier, and T Mobile was still calling it four G because you know, it was it was good for G but it was still four G, but A T and T was marketing it as five G E, and the company understandably became the target of criticism, largely from other carriers, and T Mobile was chief among them.

It took more than a year of pressure, but T Mobile had turned to the National Advertising Division to protest that A T. T was using five G as a marketing tool when it wasn't actually using five G technologies, and T Mobile's claim was that this amounts to false advertising.

So the National Advertising Division told A T and T to knock that stuff off, and after appealing this decision and then being shot down, A T and T agreed to no longer use five G E and its advertising and marketing in twenty twenty, though the five G E icon still appears on customers phones using four G LTE networks.

Uh that being said, A T and T also has legit five G handsets and five G infrastructure in some places, So if you have a phone on A T and T S low or mid band five G network and you connect to one of those, it will say five G, not five G E five G. If you connect to a high band network, then you get the five G plus icon. But even in the old LTE network you'll c five G E even though it's four G technology. Other companies didn't come out spotless in this whole endeavor either.

Verizon caught some major criticism after airing ads that said five G technology would enable other big breakthroughs, such as in medical treatments for cancer. Now that is just difficult to back up. The low latency and the high data throughput are helpful in a lot of applications, assuming you can take advantage of mid band or preferably high band five G frequencies. But faster transmission speeds and lower latency

don't magically make new technologies just appear. They can facilitate implementations, but they don't make them just happen. So as a comparison, faster computers doesn't immediately mean you're going to get better software. Right. You can make a more sophisticated software of possibility by

creating faster computers, but it doesn't make it a certainty. Moreover, for facilities like hospitals, in hospital networks are likely to be robust enough without five G to give the speeds and low latency that you need for stuff like telesurgery, For example, Now you could argue that five G could extend that capability beyond well funded hospitals, But then you're left with the question of how likely is it that a mobile carrier is going to build out its network

into regions that are either outside of dense urban centers or outside of more privileged areas. In general, I mean, the networks are going to be built to where the customers are at a density that's high enough to justify

the expense. So I don't think it's really likely that we're gonna see carriers building out five G network infrastructure surrounding hospitals to give that, you know, one thousand feet of coverage in every direction now, so you'd have to build multiple and tan is around your typical hospital to really cover it. And even then, the high band stuff is not gonna penetrate the walls of the hospital, so there's some limited use here. Then we have the political angle.

The tech powering five G comes from all over the place, including China, and one of the big companies that is involved with five G technology is Whawei. But there are some concerns among some governments in the world that a communications network built atop a Chinese companies technology would be

vulnerable to backdoor snooping from Chinese government officials. There's a concern that could be genuine or it could be manufactured, depending upon the case that a technology is critical as a communications infrastructure, could be made vulnerable to bad actors from official Chinese sources. And since China has a reputation for doing stuff like encouraging hackers to infiltrate systems and

other nations, that could concern is understandable. On top of that, however, do you also have complicating matters like the trade disputes between China and the United States, You know, and in recent years, President Trump has taken a pretty hard stance against China and any chance of China playing a part

in building out five G networks within the United States. Now, whether that is from a genuine concern about national security, or it's more of a part of a bargaining strategy in a trade war, or maybe it's a bit of both, it's kind of hard to say. Honestly, I think that caution is warranted, largely because I think the Chinese government would be really tempted to persuade Huahwei to incorporate backdoors

in their systems to allow for data collection and surveillance. Now, I probably would have shrugged that off a few years ago, just because the amount of useless information you would be pulling in would be enormous, so the signal to noise ratio would be all out of whack. You would have

way too much no ways and too little signal. But now we're in the era of big data analysis, and I think it's harder to dismiss those concerns out of hand, because we're getting better at finding the signal even in massive amounts of noise, thanks to stuff like machine learning and artificial intelligence. So I'm a little more cautious now. And then we get to the conspiracy theories. Now, I am not certain how these things get started. For some people, it may just be a joke, uh, this idea that

you know, the wireless technology was creating health issues. With more recent incidents, specifically attempting to link five G technology with the spread of coronavirus. There's long been a belief among some people that radio waves are somehow affecting them adversely, even though there's not really any real scientific evidence to show a means for how that would happen. Radio transmissions don't have the same sort of of impact on us

that high energy electromagnetic radiation can have. You know, stuff like in the X ray and gamma ray range. That stuff can have a real effect on us. Radio waves have not really been shown to do that. Um, if you were to do double blind tests with these people, at least the ones I've seen, the one the studies I've read, they've used double blind tests don't really show

any proof that anything is really happening. A double blind, by the way, is a test in which neither the subject of the test or the person administering the test knows if that subject is in a control group or not, or under control conditions or not. Uh that way, the person who's administering the test can't give any hints or clues or indications to the subject about whether or not

the actual thing that's being tested is happening. So, in the case of someone who's concerned about electromagnetic radiation, you could design a test where an administrator takes the subject to a room that may or may not have an active radio transmitter of some sort inside that room, and the person who's administering the test would also not know if the antenna were active or if anything was happening in that room, So they wouldn't be able to indicate

to the subject, Hey, you're going into a control room where nothing's happening, or you're going into an actual test room you're gonna get bombarded by radio waves. Neither party would know, and it would only be after the test was fully run and the results were looked at that you would be able to see was there any connection between when we were running a control and when we were running an actual test and the supposed reactions from

the subject. As far as I've seen, none of that is really paid off, Like it just doesn't show that there's any actual causal link between radio waves and a person's alleged symptoms or or actions to it. Getting back to the conspiracies, it's possible that some people conflated five G as being related to coronavirus because the reports were that the earliest cases of coronavirus originated out of China, and thus those people made some big leaps beyond logic

that coronavirus emerged from China. Chinese companies are involved with creating five G technology. Therefore five G technologies somehow has something to do with transmitting of virus. But I don't think I need to spend any real time at all pointing out how none of that really makes any sense. There's no linking there. We've seen this escalate in some places, including incidents of people setting fire to masks, that is, the polls that hold up network equipment. We saw that

happen several times in the UK. Whether those fires were started by people who genuinely believe that five G is somehow transmitting a virus, which again is not possible, or that the five G antenna's posed some other sort of health hazard, or maybe they're just trying to stir up trouble, I can't say, but I can say that physical damage isn't something easy to defend when it comes to this

sort of thing. Maybe some of this links back to technologies that are just so complex and so sophisticated that they are beyond the understanding of the average person. I mean, there's a famous saying I believe it is Arthur C. Clarke who said that any technology that's sufficiently sophisticate enough will be indistinguishable from magic. The idea being that if it's so complicated that you cannot understand how it works.

You might as well be told it's magic. It will make no difference to you because you won't be able to understand it either way. And the fact is that people want explanations. They want to be able to understand why things are happening, and in the the lack of an explanation, they might to conclusions that are not really supportable, but they might be comforting because they offer up an explanation for the thing that is happening in the world

around them. Um, it's a lot easier to take a fake explanation and and accept that than to try and understand the real explanations. In some cases you have to do fewer Furrier transforms if you're talking about fake science, for example, So that kind of wraps up what five G is and what it isn't, and it is really confusing.

It's a It's easy to understand why people would get kind of hung up on all this part of it, because the marketing messages have been really pushing hard on a narrative that I don't think is really going to play out in the real world, at least not the way the marketing makes it seem. Um. On the flip side. We have people who are either just desperately looking for answers or are looking to stir up trouble and thus

are spreading fake stories. So I get it, but I wanted to try and clear things up as best I could. I hope this was helpful. If you have suggestions for future topics on tech stuff, whether it's a specific technology, a company, a trend in tech, let me know, Send me a message on Twitter handle this text stuff hs W, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff

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