CHARLOTTE, N.C. — There are concerns that 5G will disrupt airline travel. Right now, AT&T and Verizon say they will temporarily deactivate their service towers located near some airports. But we’ve gotten a lot of other questions about 5G and our everyday lives.
Is 5g faster?
According to T-Mobile, which has also rolled out its 5G services, with 5G, high amounts of data can be transmitted more efficiently than 4G LTE. That means superior speeds for things like downloading movies and shows or video chatting.
Charlotte city councilman, Tariq Bokhari, who is also the Founder and Executive Director of Carolina FinTech Hub, says while it is faster, it’s not exponentially faster. He says the big sell for 5G is what it can do for our future.
“While it's going to have better bandwidth, and, you know, gig speed, that you don't even necessarily, you know, need to have a device in your house to get potentially, in the long term. It's really about its breadth, its ability to connect to devices,” Bokhari said.
T-Mobile said 5G has support for more devices to be able to get a faster signal at large events. So that will mean less fighting for internet access the next time you’re at a sporting event or concert and are connected to 5G.
Can 5G cause health issues?
We have seen a lot of questions about the safety of 5G since the pandemic began. Early on, people were saying 5G was linked to the spread of COVID-19. The claims stated Wuhan, China, where COVID-19 was first reported, was also China’s first 5g smart city, and that the virus only got more severe as more 5G towers became active.
It turns out, Wuhan wasn’t the only 5G smart city in China, and they had been installing it since February 2018, more than a year before COVID-19 existed.
Also, we saw the virus spread in many counties that didn’t have 5G access yet.
“The misinformation that's out there going as far as to say 5G caused the Coronavirus. I mean, these kinds of these are the things that are insane,” says Bokhari.
5G is the fifth generation of wireless cellular technology. It uses new tech to deliver faster signals, but it’s still using the same radio frequencies to the ones dating all the way back to 1G.
“There's a difference between radiation and all radiation isn't bad necessarily. There's the radiation that's just in your normal daylight environment that's out there. And then there's something called ionizing radiation. This is the bad cancer-causing stuff," Bokhari said.
He said a lot of the technology related to 5G isn't brand new. "It's the combination of three things we know well: the computer, the telephone, and the radio. We've had that in existence and studying RF frequencies for 100 years, over 70 years of that we've been studying them in a pretty in-depth manner.”
Cellphone companies say 5G has rolled out in 40 other countries without any problems.
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