Summary: 5G ‘health scares’ and the anti-tech bandwagon

In the UK, the spectrum that’s going to be used for 5G deployments is the old analogue TV space around 700Mhz. It’s been in use for well over 50 years, and TV transmitters output at *vastly* higher power levels than cellular transmitters.

The data layer – 2.3Ghz (recovered from the MoD) and 3.4-3.8Ghz (recovered from amateur radio repeaters) – is also spectrum that’s been extensively used in the past.

So again, we’re not actually talking about anything that’s not been used before, and the power that 5G cells output will be orders of magnitude lower than the old TV transmitters of yesteryear.

Radio spectrum is a valuable resource, which is why it’s managed so rigorously by Ofcom (independent telecoms regulator). You might recall a few years ago the 4G spectrum auctions: UKgov made billions out of the mobile networks as they competed for a limited ‘space’. And that’s the crux of it: there’s only a limited amount of ‘space’ to go around, so they are constantly recycling frequencies for new tech, but the underlying frequencies are the same as we’ve been using for decades.

If there were significant health concerns, we’d have seen them *way* before now; to reiterate, these are frequencies that have already been in use for decades.