Health scares, 18 metre masts, autonomous vehicles, economic recovery, critical national infrastructure, Huawei… It’s a long list.

2020/01852/TEL56: Rylett Road / John Betts House: 5G proposed mast and cabinets

In Hammersmith we’ve started to see planning notices for 5G base stations, ironically mostly from the company named Three, and yes, since you ask, they are using Huawei.

From the Society’s perspective, our concerns centre on the mast height, positioning, and the associated, rather retro, street clutter.  There’s some further reading at the foot of the article, but first, to get some perspective, let’s get our terminology clear, review the most prevalent public concerns and take quite a hard look at the benefits – both real and more far-fetched.

The most widely used 5G band in the UK will be 3.6GHz…
…5G is just as safe as 4G, 3G and GSM.
– Institution of Engineering and Technology

A quick canter through some confusing G’s

1G to 5G phones

Here 1G means ‘First Generation’ AKA Analogue ‘brick’ phones of the 1980’s, 2G (AKA ‘GSM’ or ‘Global System for Mobile Communications’), a typical Nokia from the late 1990’s, 3G, the first phones with really usable Internet connections, and today’s 4G, typified by a smartphone – Apple or Android. There was even a 2.5G and we mention 4.5G later.

The gifts of Heinrich Hertz, or a billion of them, come in the form of a Gigahertz (GHz), the frequency a thousand times the Megahertz we’ve had since VHF FM radio days.  1G to 4G phones have used various radio frequencies over the years, depending on operator and country, from 800MHz up to 2.6GHz, but the operating frequency used doesn’t directly affect the data speed as far as the user is concerned.  WiFi is sometimes confusingly termed 2.4G or ‘2.4 Gig’ or ‘5 Gig’, referring to bands – 2.4GHz (the same frequency as a microwave oven but a minuscule fraction of the power) and 5GHz: a less congested, shorter range band that has nothing to do with 5G: 5th generation mobile technology.

In the digital world we similarly have Megabits describing the speed of received data – whatever the technology that delivered it – and the Gigabit of your scribe’s home, and likely your office’s high speed Ethernet wired network. We won’t discuss the many flavours of WiFi on top of the frequency bands mentioned: A, B, G, N AC, AX… a story seemingly involving yet another G, until WiFi leapfrogs 5G by changing it’s letters to numbers, becoming WiFi 4, 5, and 6, and in future extending into a new 6GHz band.  That’s the GG’s corralled 🐴

The most popular 5G band, 3.6 GHz, is slightly higher than current ranges, the implication may be more base stations as range is slightly reduced, but other bands may be used to compensate. The 700MHz band for example, cleared in June this year (responsible for the loss of several HD TV channels from Crystal Palace), has yet to be auctioned off, but is earmarked by OFCOM for 5G.

Mobile emissions

If you are at all concerned about health effects, first check and understand the implications of the SAR value for your existing 2G/3G/4G phone, which have been published by manufacturers since the days of 2G when such concerns first arose – or better, stop using it now !

Unfortunately in addition to the above health concerns, the 5G cause has been muddied, and probably harmed by overzealous marketing, too many G’s and spurious claimed benefits – we prefer to keep to the tried-and-trusted recipe of ‘more & faster’, on which it certainly will deliver. 

In the autonomous vehicle gold rush, 5G has been presented as a key part of navigation and safety, but its importance is moderated by looking at the planned coverage maps, or considering the simple question – what would happen if coverage were not available or reliable, or the oncoming vehicle was 10 years old – would it be acceptable for safety to be compromised? Of course not, but here again subtle misinformation is the key – there’s a more detailed discussion below, but for now you can park great swathes of hype.

Planning

Setting aside the geo-politics and technologies for a moment, our concerns regarding the current proposals for those such as the Rylett Road one shown above, are around visual amenity of 18 metre masts, and inappropriate placement in a conservation area, blocking access to the newly widened pavement for a possible cycle cut-through, the pelican crossing and sight-impaired Pocklington Trust residents adjacent, when there are so many better locations nearby, including on existing buildings, and/or sharing with other companies base stations as recommended in the NPPF.Measuring just under the allowed 20m, it’s simply easier to exploit recent changes to Permitted Development Rights and plonk one on the street.  Having reviewed a couple of notices in detail, we are beginning to suspect that their positioning has more to do with the length of the hydraulic arm on the delivery truck, than our amenity values.

Speed ✔ Capacity ✔ Latency 😕?  What are the benefits ?

It’s no wonder the journos are confused – there’s an unholy blend of technologies at work in autonomous vehicles, with which 5G is often mentioned, and in some ways become synonymous. Some ‘5G technology’ employed is actually direct vehicle-vehicle communication (‘V2X‘ which originated as WiFi) on a different frequency to 5G, but assisted by the mobile network where available, with ultimate safety critical functions the remit of the vehicle itself using Radar, Lidar, sensors and/or the Mk.1 eyeball 👁.  Importantly, it’s such weasel words that blend technologies and at the same time blur ‘critical’ (thinking) with the simply ‘evolutionary’ in people’s minds, which makes us wonder about 5G’s purported criticality as national infrastructure.  But we don’t dabble in politics – more & faster will always be incrementally beneficial at some point, if perhaps not critical.

Network latency across the world

Latency

The third advertised benefit of 5G is latency – how fast can one device respond to another – which is quite esoteric and only matters to ‘real-time’ systems, the most obvious of which, aside from the above, is gaming.  In order for a system to perform in ‘real-time’, it requires the whole system, end-to-end, to be properly engineered for the purpose, something that is actually pretty hard to achieve in practice given all the servers and networks typically involved; the best-case 5G latencies of around 1 millisecond measured in the lab. unencumbered by general-purpose infrastructure, are unlikely to be achieved by you or us.  In reality our experience will be more like landline-based broadband: 10-20 milliseconds locally, which is not revolutionary at all. 

For comparison, typical hand-eye response times are around 10 times this, possibly lower for youthful gamers, and today’s 4G/4G+ latency is a not too shabby 20-25 milliseconds, measured in W6.  Even here, the journos are confused about real time weather and information (latencies of tens of seconds or minutes will do), and real time systems, where milliseconds and microseconds count.  We could even get onto the difference between latency that’s guaranteed and that which is simply ‘best-effort’, a whole subject in itself.  Suffice to say if the latency figure wanders around, it’s pretty useless for a hard ‘real-time’ system, hence the words ‘pretty hard to achieve…’

Some smartphone applications can benefit – mobile gaming, VR headsets and real-time Augmented Reality (AR). OK, if you must, but at what cost? And how large is the economic value ? This is the aspect that missing from almost every 5G discussion, who will choose to pay more for this significantly higher-energy consuming tech, unless able to properly appreciate the benefits ?  Bizarrely the presentations are dominated by the Telco’s who are trying to gain some marketing advantage by offering something new and whizzy, yet on whom a lot of the costs will land, for a fairly narrow gambit of real-world benefits. A few ‘early adopters’ will doubtless pay a 5G premium, the rest of us will get it with a new phone, perhaps without much realising.

3G, 4G, 5G or Wifi – a tiny number of smartphone apps care how the data arrives – today’s 70 or 150 megabit 4G connection (depending on carrier – and we’re talking theoretical maxima here to compare with theoretical 5G speeds used in the publicity) is already 3-7 times faster than the average broadband speeds, but for most users in practice 4G is comparable to average broadband, though often faster to upload, being more speed-symmetrical.   4G+/4.5G is already with us in major UK cities, providing twice the original 4G speeds, and some early 4G+ vs. 5G consumer tests in the USA show comparable performance in the real world.

BCC ‘No more not-spots’ campaign

If better coverage and fewer not-spots were key benefits, 5G could be nationally critical.  In 2014, your scribe received a Voice-Over-IP call (Internet telephony) from London while waiting on an underground platform in Bangkok in rush hour, the call remained clear on the packed train for a couple of stops (all underground), and continued unbroken walking up and out of the station at the other end, and while walking 1/4 mile to the hotel.  An expensively choreographed technology demo?  No, an everyday, and cost-free experience using a basic £120 Android phone. This level of coverage, also available in the nether regions of a typical Alpine ski resort, is the kind of thing Londoners can only dream of, but should have reasonably expected long ago.

Some of the more unusual claims for 5G involve telemedicine, perhaps trying to capitalise on the nation’s current love affair with the NHS. While a 5G-connected ambulance could be beneficial in some rare circumstances, Virtual Reality operations conducted across a European city using 5G (Vodafone), showing a doctor in front of a machine within a metre or two of an Ethernet network socket represents pure marketing hype!

Doctor – I’m not going under the knife until you plug that machine into a reliable fixed network!

The likelihood of failure of a wired or optical network is infinitesimally small, latency locally is measured in microseconds not milliseconds, it easily trounces any wireless technology for speed, capacity and reliability – it can be very easily made fault tolerant as many mission-critical IT networks have been for years. Such established networks are, after all, the backbone that knits 5G and the Internet together. 

Urban 2.4GHz WiFi congestion – in W6

Similarly, much parliamentary talk, even pledges on the urgency of providing super-fast broadband are overplayed by politicians who seem not to understand that the horribly congested and very limited WiFi bands most people rely on in the home (your scribe’s laptop currently battling with no fewer than 19 competing hotspots), are often the key bottleneck. For all the super-fastness, the last few metres over the air can more than double latency attributed to ‘slow broadband’ and sometimes cut speed to a few megabits. Did we mention slow websites ? That’s for another day.

Members, and TV interviewees in the pandemic, suffering breakup on Zoom calls or intermittent connections would do well to use the simple zero-cost option of moving closer to the router, or if possible use 5GHz WiFi; best of all, connect with the Ethernet cable that’s gathering dust in the box the router came in.  The situation worsens of course as denser blocks/towers proliferate.  4G or 5G can be better than broadband + WiFi in these cases, but not for the reasons many think. 

As retro as it sounds, the government might serve us as well by requiring new buildings to be network cabled, a straightforward low-cost process these days, not significantly harder and much more useful than installing largely obsolete phone cables anywhere past the master socket.  Those simple cables will last decades, suffering no latency or interference, and using no power, will be measurably greener.  They can be used for a much wider range of functions: from old-fashioned phones, through multi-Gigabit data distribution, ‘power-over-Ethernet’ to power small devices or high-tech HDBaseT for a huge variety of high quality multimedia connectivity around the home.

Evolutionary, not revolutionary, we can’t help wondering if perhaps the 5G hype had been turned down a notch or two, then the health and pandemic conspiracy theories,the fire-bombing of 5G installations, plus the damaging Huawei debacle might never have got off the ground ? 

More reading

• The Institution of Engineering and Technology:  5G Safety
• London Society presentation/video (warning – contains a comparison of braking distance for autonomous car using 4G vs. 5G, not relevant ref. above discussion)
• UK Government: 5G mobile technology: a guide