The Truth About 5G

this episode of real engineering is brought to you by brilliant a problem solving website that teaches you to think like an engineer ok I didn't think I would need to make this video but people are burning down valuable infrastructure out of fear for their health I'm sure you have heard all the insane theories 5g towers are weakening the immune system and causing the global pandemic 5g is causing cancer 5g is mind control by the lizard people I don't think I will succeed in convincing many of the lunatics that believe these things so I'm not going to try but let's explore what 5g actually is how it works and some of its real problems today we're going to learn some interesting things about data transmission science and learn how our ability to transfer data through the air has evolved over the past four decades hopefully we can pull a few of the people on the fence over to the side we're rational people live in the process we have been using different wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation to transmit information for hundreds of years in ancient Greece they use signal fires to convey messages with visible light today we send messages with light through fiber-optic cables these cables are capable of carrying insane quantities of information and are the bedrock of the Internet but we can't connect all devices to it because many devices need to be wireless to make wireless data transmission possible cellular networks needed to be developed and it all started here in Japan in 1979 with the first generation cellular network which we now call 1g it began in Tokyo where high-power radio towers would communicate directly with phones installed and caris these towers used radio waves with frequencies sitting around here on the electromagnetic spectrum and simply transferred the data in analog let's see how analog data can be transmitted using a carrier frequency say we want to send a sound wave a simple sine wave of 100 Hertz we want to apply it to an 850 megahertz wave a wave with significantly higher frequency we can do this with amplitude modulation or frequency modulation AM and FM you have definitely heard of these terms before with radio stations a.m. applies the data to the amplitude of the carrier frequency so it will vary the amplitude of the carrier frequency like so basically tracing the original wave with its peaks and troughs FM applies to data to the frequency of the carrier wave like so varying the distance between Peaks to trace the original wave to transfer a call using this method you need a dedicated frequency band defined by the lowest and highest frequencies used if another user is using that frequency band on the same tower then you need to use a different frequency band the more frequency bands you have the more calls the tower can handle this is bandwidth as the number of users grew the system's capabilities were continually been stretched adding more frequencies to grow bandwidth is an option but adding frequencies comes with its difficulties frequencies need to be licensed and there is a lot of competition weather radar military communication and security systems GPS television broadcasts radio stations radio astronomy aviation systems and air traffic control they all need their own frequency bands in order to gain new frequency bands companies often had to go to auction and purchased the license with huge capital investment this was done with every new generation of cell network but a lot was done to cram more data onto a single frequency band through the years increasing the number of users that can use the same frequency band can be as simple as increasing the number of towers instead of using a single high power tower to cover an entire city multiple lower power towers could be used frequency bands could then be assigned to individual customers within each towers range without interfering with the same band in neighboring cells this increased the number of users networks could support but it did not increase the data transfer rates at its best one G was capable of 2.4 kilobits per second but describing it in bits is a best counterintuitive because as we said it worked in analog bits were the units of digital data 2g assured in a new era of mobile phones with the introduction of a fully digital system instead of encoding an analogue signal into a frequency band we encoded binary data if you are like me this was your first experience with cellular networks my first phone was this beast the legendary Nokia 3310 sure it could make calls but digital data allowed for a new form of communication this was the era a new language was born text speak a language of gibberish invented to keep within the 160 character limit and prevent your mobile network provider from charging you for two texts in English each character in that 160 character text was encoded with 7 bits therefore a 160 character text contained 1120 bits when 2 G was first introduced it could achieve 9.6 kilobits per second it could handle that 1120 bit text message with ease but the 2g era lasted right up to the launch of the first iPhone and speeds had increased to 200 kilobits per second thanks to improved internet protocols like general packet radio switching or GPRS sometimes referred to as 2.5 G by the time the iPhone 2 launched 3G was the new hot topic 3G introduced additional frequency bands it's estimated that in Europe alone companies paid over 100 billion dollars in auctions to gain new frequencies but 3G also made the change to a system that fully utilized the method of data packet switching which GPRS utilized packet switching allowed thousands of customers to share many different frequencies far more efficiently here data was split into smaller data packets each data packet contains a header which contains the address of the destination and information on how to reassemble the data packets splitting the data into smaller bite-sized chunks allow to make better use of the frequency bands available instead of trying to find a large gap of availability on a single frequency band we could split the data into small chunks and send it across many different frequency bands the moment is small availability appeared like changing from sending a huge truck of data on a single road to sending thousands of motorcycle messengers over roads with the least traffic this made our use of the frequency bands capacity more efficient and allowed us to carry more data as time went on these protocols improved allowing even more efficient use of the bandwidth in 2005 high-speed packet access or HSPA which you have likely seen represented on your phone as a H+ was introduced which increased speeds up to 42 megabits per second this was labeled 3.5 G 4G introduced a new technology called long term evolution or LTE it introduced even more frequency bands like the 700 megahertz band that was previously used for analog TV broadcasts it also introduced a new way of squeezing more data through the existing frequency bands with orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing or OFDM OFDM allowed us to send far more data you are probably familiar with the idea of constructive and destructive interference where two waves meeting can combine and either enhance or cancel out the amplitude of each other to prevent this signals traditionally had to be separated out over time to prevent interference but OFDM allowed the signals to be squeezed together an overlap allowing the same amount of data to be sent over a shorter period of time when the signals arrived they were separated out and converted to binary data once again how I don't know magic or math or something honestly the fact we can stream HD movies on her phone without a wired connection should seem like magic to the average person it has gotten so advanced that we are now struggling to increase speeds without adding new frequencies but aren't a whole lot available so network providers are now reaching into the bargain bin and taking out frequencies nobody wants to use high-frequency millimeter waves higher frequency waves have normally been shunned for these types of applications higher frequency waves just earned as good at traveling they get blocked by practically everything including rain think of them like visible ice unless you have a direct line of sight with the torch you can't see it to deal with this network providers need to install huge numbers of transmitters studies have estimated that to bring 100 megabit per second download speeds to 72 percent population coverage and one gigabit per second speeds to 55 percent of the u.s. population about 13 million utility pole mounted 28 gigahertz base stations would be needed at a cost of 400 billion dollars having this many base stations will help relieve congestion over a single frequency band but 5g will also be using something called massive MIMO or massive multiple-input multiple-output these are basically just groups of antenna that are listening and broadcasting to the same frequency bands this would cause interference but 5g is also looking to use beamforming which will allow the antenna to aim at your phone instead of broadcasting the signal in all directions this coupled with the fact that higher frequency waves can carry more data means 5g is reaching speeds of up to 1,800 megabits per second in the u.s. higher frequencies can carry more information because we are encoding our information into the wave cycles our measure of frequency is hertz but all one hertz really means is that one wave cycle is reaching us per second 10 Hertz means 10 wave cycles are reaching us per second and 190 mega Hertz means 190 million wave cycles are reaching us for a second because we are encoding our information into the wave cycles that means we can encode more information into higher frequency waves up until now we've been using frequencies between 700 megahertz and 2500 megahertz so 700 million wave cycles per second to two thousand five hundred million wave cycles per second 5g will allow higher download speeds and lower latency this will be huge for time critical technologies like self-driving cars that require rapid communication between vehicles in the network and allow even more devices to join the network to create the Internet of Things 5g has a lot of potential and no it's not dangerous the electromagnetic spectrum starts on the far left with gamma radiation which has very high frequency and short wavelengths higher frequencies and shorter wavelengths equates to higher energy and indeed gamma radiation does cause cancer anything over here you need to worry about but 5g is operating all the way over here towards the lower energy frequencies yes pass visible ice which last time I checked no one is afraid of yes like visible ice and microwaves it's possible to cause heating with high enough powered beams of these wavelengths this is the only non crackpot theory I can find on 5g that actually sits in the realm of plausibility the military even used high-powered 95 gigahertz beams in their Active Denial system which just made the people on the receiving end feel like someone just opened an oven door in front of their face and it could burn people if exposed for long enough it's uncomfortable and was intended to disperse crowds this was essentially a focused beam of 95 gigahertz light akin to a massive magnifying glass focusing lights to burn a piece of paper because yes just as visible light can be used to cause heating so can these wavelengths when used in high enough power and intensity as we said earlier these frequencies are blocked by rain and so they certainly can't penetrate your skin and these transmitters simply don't have the power to cause heating that would be damaging they are simply too low power and there are plenty of studies that show that they are not harmful if you are afraid of 5g in this way you as well be afraid of streetlights because they emit higher energy frequencies everyday technologies like this can seem like magic until you peel back the layers to their earliest iteration and see that they are just the product of many years of problem-solving with each successive generation adding more complexity if you'd like to learn more about the whole electromagnetic spectrum including which parts are dangerous and which aren't you should check out brilliants course that unravels the physics of waves and lies inside you'll learn things like how light can exhibit both particle-like and wave-like behaviors how much energy electromagnetic radiation can carry and even how to measure the speed of light you can set a goal to improve yourself and then work at that goal a little bit every day brilliant makes that easy with interactive explorations and a mobile app that you can take with you wherever you are if you are naturally curious want to build your problem-solving skills or need to develop confidence in your analytical abilities then get brilliant premium to learn something new every day brilliant thought provoking math science and computer science content helps guide you to mastery by taking complex concepts and breaking them up into bite-sized understandable chunks you'll start by having fun with interactive explorations and over time you'll be amazed with what you accomplished as always thanks for watching and thank you to all my patreon supporters if you'd like to see more from me the links to my Instagram Twitter discord server and reddit Ereb below you

Channel: Real Engineering

Views: 2,248,519

Rating: 4.692225 out of 5

Keywords: engineering, science, technology, education, history, real

Id: g-gGeAe-PJA

Length: 14min 59sec (899 seconds)

Published: Sat May 09 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/JohnHue]

Watched it a few days ago, it's a good explanation of the iterative process that lead to 5G being what it is, and goes a good job at explaining how it's not a fundamentally different tech than previous generations (EM-waves wise)... but, the title is a bit click-bait, because it doesn't go into any kind of details as to what these frequencies actually do to the body (even if they don't do anything). Brody made an interesting analogy about a street light actually emitting more energy than what 5G, which would have been IMO a very good starting point to get into what kind of EM waves we're surrounded by at all times and how the power of these waves differ from each other and from 5G.

[u/rgarisn]

This video explains the development of cell phone technology from the beginning to 5G. It's definitely worth the time to watch. The safety aspects of electromagnetic frequencies used for the technology begins at 11:38 in the video.

[u/Jormungandragon]

I'm kind of disappointed that this wasn't a coronavirus conspiracy video.

Wait, I mean glad.

[u/ARAR1]

This is supposed to be "REAL ENGINEERING" but they don't get into how it actually work.

Quote: How? I don't know. Magic or math or something

Really? If you can't explain how it works why title this engineering?

[u/blackjesus75]

It's an ad campaign is what it is. Also gives them a reason to hike prices.

[u/major_fox_pass]

While this video correctly points out that mmWave isn't energetic enough to be ionizing, it incorrectly states that this means it has no biological effects outside of heating. The video is also incorrect when it says it can't penetrate the skin.

This paper isn't directly about 5G but does lay out possible biological effects of exposing cells to mmWave in section 4: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5746568/

Paper on 5G penetrating the skin by using sweat glands as a waveguide: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29459303
(File access)

This series of articles on EETimes is more accessible if you don't want to read a bunch of papers: https://www.eetimes.com/5g-health-risks-no-conclusions-so-far/

It's worth pointing out that not all 5G is mmWave, and that effects on health haven't been definitively proven yet either way.

[u/grease_racket]

The Signal Path did it better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0xwyVlqsRo

[u/elbekko]

Big Clive had a good one about it too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Du8yQeQdMBk

[u/Belyntien]

The video is well-made but this is not the whole truth... As with everything there are downsides to 5g: increased power consumption, increased amount of antennas that can be an eyesore,... And the things it brings to the table seem to be limited (more speed looks like a good selling point but more of a marketting argument than a real need).

The interesting question would be : Is it worth it or is it just a massive undertaking for the sake of selling more phones?