Energy Demand Could Triple With 5G

The Telecom Industry has provided NO scientific evidence that 5G exposure is safe; however, opposition and warnings about widespread installation is about more than health risks. 5G small base stations use 3x as much energy as 4G base stations (see 1, 2) and that’s just one of the environmentally unfriendly issues associated with it (see 1, 2, 3).

According to a growing number of sources, this massive increase in energy demand for 5G is really bad for anyone concerned about the environment – including the companies promising to drastically reduce carbon emissions. From Gulf News:

The prospect of having to raise spending on electricity — energy demand could triple with the introduction of 5G equipment, according to industry body GSMA — won’t sit well with phone companies that are already struggling to pay their dividends.

At the same time, firms such as BT Group Plc and Vodafone Group Plc have pledged to slash emissions, and that will require a rapid shift to renewable energy.

Just as carriers are about to roll out vast quantities of power-hungry gear, they’re also promising to save the planet. And funds are tight.

Accomplishing everything at the same time could be a tall order.

[…]

Next-generation antennas and masts can be ten times more energy efficient than 4G’s. However, these power savings could get swamped by the surge in demand for new applications.

5G will link up billions of things that have never been connected before.

To accommodate all these new connections, masts might have as many as 128 antennas, versus just four or eight on a typical 4G mast.

Bouncing signals through cities may require thousands of transmitters and receivers to be bolted onto rooftops and street furniture. This looks like it will all require a lot more bandwidth, and a lot more power.

What’s more, carriers can’t afford the cost of swapping out all their equipment at once, Berglund said. The roll-out will have to happen gradually, so many masts will still carry less efficient 4G, 3G and 2G antennas alongside 5G ones. This situation could last for years — some 3G kit is still in place 18 years after that technology was introduced.

But whatever fixes carriers make to lower energy bills — sharing networks, getting masts to autonomously power down at times of low data demand, introducing ‘beam-forming’ so smart antennas can pinpoint devices instead of pumping out data indiscriminately — the surge in power usage creates a multitude of challenges regardless of one’s views about the man-made climate change narrative.

Decades of research has already determined that all sources of cell phone and WiFi radiation are biologically and environmentally harmful – including 5G (see 1, 2, 3). According to this article (and others), widespread 5G implementation seems to require adding it on top of all the other harmful 1G through 4G sources already in existence. Freaked out yet? You should be – people and their pets are already suffering where 5G has been installed (see 1, 2, 3).

Originally published by B. N. Frank at Activist Post.