Ok, for like the sixteenth time this week I’ll explain this – I’m getting tired of this shit. I’m putting this up here so I can just send the link to people fighting over it instead of repeating myself a zillion times.

Note: If you were sent this link, you have probably been a victim of fake news!!!

First off, before you even read what I’m going to say, please take a moment to educate yourself on how to spot fake news. Many of the convincing looking articles out there that are trying to convince people that there are health risks linked with 5G wireless technology, or worse yet, that it is somehow “powering” the COVID-19 viral pandemic, are literally just fake news being propagated via a variety of sources including Russian propaganda bots. (Why, I wonder? I… frankly don’t care.)

I also highly recommend checking the Ad Fontes Media Bias Chart which ranks media sources on both their reliability for factual reporting and their level/direction of bias. If the source doesn’t even appear on the chart OR appears way down at one end or the other of the bell curve, look elsewhere.

5G wireless is not harmful. It is not harmful to people living, working, or playing near towers, using mobile phone handsets, or even to properly trained tower workers and technicians maintaining the base station equipment. (In fact, the physical supporting tower itself is the only significant risk, mostly from fall hazards.)

It is not using hazardous ionizing radiation which can cause cancer or other health problems. It is not using high RF power levels that can cause injury from heating or thermal burns to tissue. It is not generating strong magnetic fields. NOTHING.

IT IS CERTAINLY NOT CONTRIBUTING TO OR RELATED IN ANY WAY TO THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC,  YOU MORONS. If it was still supported in modern browers I’d pepper in the fucking <blink> tag to make sure you see this.

5G wireless is in most cases using the same radio frequency bands and low transmitter power levels that 4G, 3G, EV-DO, LTE, whatever currently in use, are using. The only odd exception is that T-Mobile’s implementation, in some areas, is going to also have some millimeter wave channels in use for base to mobile transmissions. Users will not be exposed to high RF field strengths unless they physically climb the tower and give the antenna a big hug. So, uh, don’t do that.

The handsets you’ll have will continue to transmit at 600 to 800 Mhz as always, at very low power levels as they do now. Consider the fact that a mobile phone handset has to run off a battery of limited size and actually, you know, run on that for a long period of time. In all cases I’ve seen, the mobile phone’s CPU and screen consume 2-10 times as much power as the radios.

I’ve seen the TMobile millimeter wave system compared to the military’s active denial system, but that’s a really shitty comparison as the ADS uses kilowatts of power focused by a huge truck mounted dish for truly crazy effective radiated power levels. Specifications on the device are hard to come by but a smaller version was specified in a WIRED article as sending 30,000 watts. From speaking with a TMobile technician about it, he told me that the transmitter power (I don’t recall if it was effective radiated power or transmitter power output) will be approximately 50 watts, HOWEVER, the path loss is HUGE at those frequencies, so once you’re just a few feet away from the antenna sectors, you’re back down within safe RF exposure limits. They pretty much expect to only use the millimeter wave stuff within a few outdoor urban areas where there’s a high density of subscribers who will use it. It will not pass through trees, walls, or windows at any usable level.

It’s all entirely harmless to everyone except for the deluded consumer who thinks it’ll actually give them more bandwidth. Nobody’s actually investing in improving the bandwidth and reliability of the fiberoptic networks behind all this shit, so it will continue to be garbage. It’ll just be garbage in a fancier can.

Please, do not listen to Russian propaganda bots and clickbait websites. Do not listen to Alex Jones / Infowars. Don’t go chasing chemtrails, please stick to the rivers and the lakes that you used to.