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By Deb Mayer, Jan 7, 2019 | Original Parents Across America Oregon article here.

During the summer of 2018 a group of Oregonians coalesced around the idea that too much use of wirelessly connected cell phones, tablets, and laptops is having adverse effects on children. Fiber optic and Ethernet connections to these devices is far superior:

Awarness of an escalating incidence of the following prompted them into take action:

• Eye ailments
• Headaches
• ADHD
• Behavioral problems
• Other health problems

After considerable research and consultation with experts and policy makers, the group drafted three bills addressing the problems of unfettered use of wireless devices.

The legislative initiatives center around three imperatives:

1. Warning labels on wireless products

2. Time limits on wireless devices in classrooms

3. Exposing and addressing the harmful health effects of pulsed, data-modulated, Radio-frequency Electromagnetic Microwave Radiation (RF-EMR) radiation especially on children at school.

These legislative initiatives were introduced during the intersession and will be given a first reading in the 2019 Oregon legislative session (SB = Senate Bill; LC = Legislative Concept)

• SB.291/LC-1412 — Warning labels on wireless products

• SB.282/LC-1413 — Limiting use of wireless devices and infrastructure in classrooms snf on school campuses

• SB.283/LC-1214 — Radio-frequency Electromagnetic Microwave Radiation (RF-EMR) exposures in schools

All three bills are sponsored by Oregon State Senator Laurie Monnes Anderson. Oregon State Representative Alissa Keny-Guyer signed on as chief sponsor in the House for the labeling and Wi-Fi bills, Representative Tawna Sanchez is chief sponsor on limiting screen time in classrooms.

Read the text of each bill, by clicking on the links above.

by Karl Bode Jan 4 2019 | Original Motherboard article here.

Government shutdown forces FCC to take a break from kissing up to big telecom.

The FCC suspended most operations on Thursday afternoon as a result of the ongoing government shutdown over a dumb fence many argue creates far more problems than it solves. The resulting shutdown has left 800,000 government employees furloughed without pay, while garbage and human waste begin to pile up at the nation’s staff-depleted national park system.

Continue reading “FCC Shuts Down While Ajit Pai Jokes”

By Milan Milanović Oct 24, 2018 | Original Speedtest article here.

5G stands for "Fifth Generation" Wireless Technology and is the next evolution for mobile technology after 4G LTE. 5G promises to bring faster download speeds and lower latency. 5G enables operators to address increasing growth in wireless data transmissions for mobile and internet of things (IoT) devices.

A brief history of cellular technologies

Every decade or so, a new generation of mobile technology has brought performance improvements and has introduced new applications and use cases.

• 1G, in the 1980s, (analog cellular) enabled mobile phone calls.
• 2G, in the 1990s brought digital voice and texting. In the 2000s, 3G
• 3G, in the 2000s brought the mobile internet at basic speeds
• 4G/LTE in the 2010s brought faster internet and streaming HD video

Now in the 2020s, 5G is the next marketing term to describe the next step in Wireless networks. Defined by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standards body, 5G is listed as wireless standard "Release 15" and "Release 16." 5G is also sometimes referred to as 5G NR, which stands for 5G New Radio.

Continue reading “Explaining 5G”

By Simon Romero, Dec. 31, 2018 | Original New YorkTimes article here.

A Waymo autonomous vehicle in Chandler, Ariz., where the driverless cars have been attacked by residents on several occasions. Credit: Caitlin O’Hara for The New York Times

CHANDLER, Ariz. — The assailant slipped out of a park around noon one day in October, zeroing in on his target, which was idling at a nearby intersection — a self-driving van operated by Waymo, the driverless-car company spun out of Google.

He carried out his attack with an unidentified sharp object, swiftly slashing one of the tires. The suspect, identified as a white man in his 20s, then melted into the neighborhood on foot.

The slashing was one of nearly two dozen attacks on driverless vehicles over the past two years in Chandler, a city near Phoenix where Waymo started testing its vans in 2017. In ways large and small, the city has had an early look at public misgivings over the rise of artificial intelligence, with city officials hearing complaints about everything from safety to possible job losses.

Some people have pelted Waymo vans with rocks, according to police reports. Others have repeatedly tried to run the vehicles off the road. One woman screamed at one of the vans, telling it to get out of her suburban neighborhood. A man pulled up alongside a Waymo vehicle and threatened the employee riding inside with a piece of PVC pipe.

Continue reading “Wielding Rocks and Knives, Arizonans Attack Self-Driving Cars”

Adapted from a Ryan Barwick article from Mar 2, 2018 | Original Center for Public Integrity article here.

Cities Ask The US Government for Assurance of No Adverse Health Effects from Radio-Frequency Microwave Radiation exposures as close as 10 to 20 feet feet from homes — with no answers in sight.

Introduction

In town halls and city council chambers across the country, local officials are facing the wrath of residents knowledgeable of the obvious, significant harms to their health & safety, privacy and property values from the next wave of wireless communications planned for many communities. Even US Senators and Representatives wrote a letter to the FCC demanding that the FCC address its negligence:

"It is critical for the FCC to act on its March 7, 2013 Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking and Inquiry to ensure all individuals and especially those living in close proximity to the hundreds of thousands of small cell facilities to be deployed, are protected from radio-frequency radiation exposures.

Federal Communications Commission, "Reassessment of Fedeial Communications Commission Radio-frequency Exposure Limits and Policies; Proposed Changes in the Cornmission’s Rules Regarding Human Exposure to Radio-frequency Electromagnetic Fields," 28 FCC Rcd 3498 (4), https:/docs.fcc.gov/public/attachmentVFCC-13- 39A-I.pdf"

Residents know that the new extreme-density 4G and 5G technology scheme — which will require hundreds of thousands of so-called "small-cell" antennas placed throughout neighborhoods — could cause adverse health effects because the antennas, located sometimes just a couple dozen feet from houses, will bathe their communities in round-the-clock forced exposures RF Microwave Radiation exposures. Currently, there is no opt out and no way to turn these antennas off at night so the residents can sleep well in their own beds.

Local governments don’t have the legal authority to block the placement, construction and modification of Wireless Telecommunications Facilities (WTFs) based on environmental health effects of RF Microwave Radiation exposures, but that does not absolve local governments from regulating the maximum power output or hours of operations of Wireless Telecommunications Facilities (WTFs) because local governments have the authority and the duty to regulate the operations of WTFs to protect the health and safety of its residents.

Continue reading “Residents Need Clarity About Safety of RF Microwave Radiation Exposures From Small Cells”

By Doug Dawson | Original Pots and Pans articles here.

Link to Part 1 — the Residential Broadband Scheme

Sept 4, 2018 — Ronan Dunne, an EVP and President of Verizon Wireless recently made Verizon’s case for aggressively pursuing 5G. This last article in the series looks at Verizon’s claim that they are going to use 5G to offer residential broadband. The company has tested the technology over the last year and announced plans to soon introduce the technology into a number of cities.

I’ve been reading everything I can about Verizon and I think I finally figured out what they are up to. They have been saying that within a few years that they will make fixed wireless 5G broadband service available to millions of homes. One of the first cities they will be building is Sacramento. It’s clear that in order to offer fast speeds that each 5G transmitter will have to be fed by fiber. To cover all neighborhoods in Sacramento would require building a lot of new fiber. Building new fiber is both expensive and time-consuming. It’s still a head-scratcher for how this might work in neighborhoods without poles where other utilities are underground.

Continue reading “The Case for Verizon 5G”

By Jacob Kastrenakes, Dec 21, 2018 | Original The Verge article here.

AT&T customers will start to see a 5G logo appear in the corner of their smartphone next year — not because they’re using a 5G phone connected to a 5G network, but because AT&T is going to start pretending its most advanced 4G LTE tech is 5G.

According to FierceWireless, AT&T will display an icon reading “5G E” on newer phones that are connected to LTE in markets where the carrier has deployed a handful of speed boosting — but still definitively 4G — technologies. The “E,” displayed smaller than the rest of the logo, refers to “5G Evolution,” the carrier’s term for networks that aren’t quite 5G but are still faster than traditional LTE.

If this sounds sadly familiar, it’s because AT&T pulled this exact same stunt during the transition to LTE. The company rolled out a speed-boosting 3G tech called HSPA+, then got all of its phone partners — even Apple! — to show a “4G” logo when on that kind of connection.

Continue reading “AT&T Will Put a Fake 5G Logo on 4G LTE phones”

. . . with a ridiculously overpowered hotspot: a Snapdragon 855 in a mobile hotspot!

​By Ron Amadeo , Dec 20, 2018 | Original ARS Technica article here.

The era of 5G mobile networks is quickly approaching, and while there isn’t any smartphone out yet sporting the new network connectivity, AT&T says that "select" early adopters will soon be able to jump on AT&T’s mobile 5G mmWave service with a mobile hotspot. AT&T’s 5G service kicks in on December 21 in some cities, which AT&T says makes it "the first and only company in the US to offer a mobile 5G device over a commercial, standards-based mobile 5G network."

The hotspot hardware is a "Netgear Nighthawk 5G Mobile Hotspot," which Netgear is calling the "first standards-based mobile 5G device in the world." Netgear’s 5G hotspot comes in at a pricey $499 and sounds ridiculously overbuilt. Despite being a mobile router/modem that has very little to do computationally, the Nighthawk is packing one of the newest, fastest SoC’s on Earth, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 SoC.

This is something we’re expecting to see inside all the high-end Android smartphones of 2019, so packing it into a modem that won’t run any apps or games seems a little extreme. As a "5G" mmWave device, the Nighthawk 5G comes with Qualcomm’s X50 mmWave modem, and, since this modem was developed alongside the Snapdragon 855, it seems like, if you want a mmWave modem right now, you also need Qualcomm’s highest-end SoC. That leads to this very overpowered hotspot, which makes it significantly bigger than the more mature 4G hardware that Qualcomm has been refining for years. We don’t have any official specs or size measurements, but the Nighthawk 5G hotspot definitely looks huge — it’s a big, bulky black box with a tiny screen in the center. The touchscreen gives you access to a basic OS for things like setting up Wi-Fi, viewing data limits, and reading messages.

As for the network, AT&T is annoyingly muddying the waters with its 5G branding.

1. It’s going to start calling its existing 4G LTE network "5G E" where the "E" stands for "evolution."
2. Its real 5G network, the mmWave one, will be called "5G+," referencing the higher frequency of a mmWave network.

Continue reading “AT&T 5G Goes Live This Week”

It’ll cost $500 for the 5G-capabe modem/router and then $70 a month, data-capped at 15GB per month. Oh, Boy . . . .

Adapted from an article by Stephen Shankland, Dec 18, 2018 | Original CNET article here.

If you live in one of a dozen US cities, you can tap into AT&T’s 5G network this week, but why would you, really?

The carrier, participating in some contrived "Race to 5G" with Verizon and other network operators to move to the next-gen wireless technology, is turning on its network on Tue Dec 18. Until 5G phones arrive in the first half of 2019, however, it’ll only be useful with Netgear’s $500 Nighthawk 5G Mobile Hotspot, a portable device that creates its own Wi-Fi network so you can link phones, laptops and tablets via W-Fi to the 5G signals beaming to and from to the Netgear Nighthawk modem/router.

AT&T’s 5G network will work in parts of (key emphasis is "parts of") . . .

1. Atlanta, GA
2. Charlotte, NC
3. Dallas, TX
4. Houston, TX
5. Indianapolis, IN
6. Jacksonville, FL
7. Louisville, KY
8. Oklahoma City, OK
9. New Orleans, LA
10. Raleigh, MC
11. San Antonio, TX
12. Waco, TX

Continue reading “AT&T’s 5G Network is Live in Some Cities and at a High Price”