This past week, the STOP Cell Towers in Carmel Neighborhoods group sent an interesting article to the City leadership team involved with the wireless ordinance process. The report basically explains how hard-wired fiber optic (underground) cabling is superior over 5G wireless small cells…due to speed, reliability, cost effectiveness, sustainability. (Of course we also know underground it’s better for aesthetics). Fiber-optic underground cabling plus wi-fi routers and were good to go.
The article is included in the Resources section of this website but it is:
Re-Inventing Wires: The Future of Landlines and Networks
Timothy Schoechle, PhD, Senior Research Fellow
National Institute for Science, Law and Public Policy, May 2018
http://electromagnetichealth.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Wires.pdf
Here are some of the highlights in case you don’t have time to read it:
“This paper sets the record straight and fills our current information vacuum, offering consumers, business leaders, and policy makers the critical facts they need to rethink a more intelligent and secure future with reliable, secure, wired communications more resilient to storm, flood, and fire, and reducing the enormous carbon footprint from the present wireless approach. It also demonstrates why the mistaken upcoming 5G frenzy, with its millions of small cell antennas destined to clutter all neighborhoods and public right-of-ways, is dangerous, wasteful, and unnecessary.”
“Energy consumption in communication networks is growing at an unsustainable rate—possibly doubling every two years—with the biggest culprits being data centers and (most significantly) wireless access networks.”
“Wired systems are comparatively far more cost- effective, and are approximately 100x faster than wireless systems. Furthermore, fiber to the home avoids the potentially disastrous outcome of populations rendered sick and disabled by acute and chronic exposure to wireless radiation pollution.”
“This report asserts that first and foremost the public needs publicly-owned and -controlled wired infrastructure that is inherently more future-proof, more reliable, more sustainable, more energy efficient, safer, and more essential to many other services. Wireless networks and services, compared to wired access, are inherently more complex, more costly, more unstable (subject to frequent revision and “upgrades”), and more constrained in what they can deliver.”
“We advocate for the essential nature of landline service and for high-speed optical fiber-based Internet access to all as a basic locally-governed community service that is secure, reliable, sustainable, and affordable—comparable to water, sewer, electricity, streets, and similar vital public utilities.”
“Buried across North America are large networks of copper wire and state-of-the-art optical fiber that provide the bedrock for a health-safe national communication system of the future. For too long we have been misled, turned astray by corporate propaganda, by compromised politicians, and by our own technical ignorance into accepting inferior, problem-ridden, and expensive wireless systems. Importantly, wireless systems also have negative economies for speed, such that adding speed becomes progressively more expensive, which then requires more spectrum and cell sites.”
“The history of U.S. communication infrastructure increasingly supports the proposition that it is unrealistic to expect private monopolies, duopolies, or triopolies—regulated or unregulated—to make the long- term investments necessary to build the enduring and sustainable public broadband fiber information highway that the country needs. Corporations will invariably seek the cheapest, quickest, and most profitable path, which has led to the current emphasis on wireless.”
“Before building out a massive wireless infrastructure to support the IoT, including new and untested 5G millimeter wave antennas, it may be worth considering to what extent a trajectory of technological development driven by the imperative to increase sales of silicon chips, software, and data will likely result in a reasonable provision of consumer satisfaction and the broader social good. This paper takes a skeptical and less than optimistic position.”
“Contrary to industry claims, copper landlines are not obsolete, but can outperform wireless by employing new VDSL or G.fast signaling technology (Gatherer, 2017). The unstated industry motive is to force subscribers into more profitable wireless networks. The claims about obsolescence and the supposed need to “step toward to the 21st century” is a self-serving, false narrative put forward by monopolistic corporations and their political lackeys.”
“It is ironic that an advanced technological global information and communication technology (ICT) system is dependent on an inefficient, polluting, and archaic energy source—coal.”
The CEET report pointed a finger at wireless access networks as the main culprit—a point made repeatedly in their report:
Our energy calculations show that by 2015, wireless cloud will consume up to 43 TWh, compared to only 9.2 TWh in 2012, an increase of 460%. This is an increase in carbon footprint from 6 megatonnes of CO2 in 2012 to up to 30 megatonnes of CO2 in 2015, the equivalent of adding 4.9 million cars to the roads. Up to 90% of this consumption is attributable to wireless access network technologies, data centers account for only 9% (p. 3).”
“Now seems an appropriate time for the FCC to step up its reevaluation of the basis of its RF exposure guidelines and to seriously consider the petitions and other statements of international groups of scientists expressing concern about the growing body of evidence showing risk. Such a reevaluation would best be accomplished in a formal working group with specialist members from the CDC, EPA, FDA, NIOSH, OSHA, and the IEEE—as well as independent researchers. A reevaluation would be especially timely given emerging plans for greater densification of antenna infrastructure closer to where people live and work.”
