5G, COVID 19 and Tinfoil Hats

There is a conspiracy theory making the rounds while claiming "5G mobile technology is responsible for COVID 19".

The first claim is that 5G suppresses the immune system and allows the virus to infect humans en mass (apparently birds also drop-dead mid-flight).

The second claim is that it somehow physically transmits the virus.

Spoiler alert: This is total hogwash and the true believers should be ranked amongst 'flat earthers' and 'anti-vaxxers'.

So, what the heck is 5G anyway?

5G is merely the latest cell phone network technology, or “5th generation” mobile. This following 4G (aka LTE).

Now here’s a dirty little secret that most all in the mobile industry won’t tell you…

There are in fact two distinctly different types of "5G", one called 5G "sub-6GHz" (which in the year 2020 is basically faster and glorified 4G/LTE on the same/similar 4G spectrum), and then there is mmWave 5G (which is mad fast with low latency - think future connected cities with self-driving cars and doctors performing remote surgery via a mobile connection - this is many many years away from real-world mass adoption and mostly used in test labs or in small pockets in a handful of first-world cities).

Here's why this differentiation matters…

This past year or so, I've been extremely vocal on several channels saying that in the year 2020, 5G is merely a handset/equipment manufacturer/telco marketing buzzword, one used to push products and services to folks who are impressed by buzzwords. Case in point is the late 2020 5G iPhone which will have little real-world mobile network performance improvements over the 2019 4G version - it is, however, a great bragging point at dinners and braais.

Further, this iPhone, as well as most “5G powered” Samsung and Huawei handsets only contain "sub-6GHz" 5G!

Infact for the foreseeable future, most countries will only be getting "sub-6GHz" 5G with few humans on the entire planet even being exposed to mmWave 5G, or at least not in the next 5-10 years (even in the market-leading regions such as America/Europe/China).

Why is this differentiation important?

Well, since folks haven't been dropping dead and catching COVID 19 from 4G, it's safe to assume that the conspiracy theorists are referring the second (new) mmWave 5G, which is to be fair, closer to a microwave oven on the spectrum wave scale, while sub-6 is closer to radio/TV. Some quick advice, I wouldn't recommend placing your head against your micro-oven door everytime you use it, and likewise I'd not recommend that you rest your head on a 5G mmWave base station all day.

That said, mmWave dissipates extremely quickly in the real world, so much so that to have any real-world use-case, mobile operators would literally need to place a (mini) base station on every street lamp, and basically every other city touchpoint, this due to the wavelengths being blocked by walls, trees, and even rain.

Further to these points however, it’s worth noting that in the conspiracy theorists videos, of “newly erected 5G base stations” with dead birds around them, this apparently due to evil 5G, it’s worth noting that these are infact NOT even mmWave base stations, they are either 4G and/or 5G sub-6GHz equipment.

Talk of mobile spectrum ("signal") being dangerous to humans is nothing new, and to be fair, even after us having had the technology for thirty years, there’s still no conclusive evidence of these dangers, but it's fair that the investigations and debate continue in this regard.

HOWEVER, not only is it highly unlikely that 5G will be "carrying" anything more/less dangerous than the previous generations of cellular spectrum, BUT it's certainly not carrying COVID 19, and any potential dangers definitely won’t be exposed by some flat-earther-turned-mobile-industry-epidemiologist and their dead bird videos that will expose it.