Much has been written about the roll out of 5G, most notably for its health & safety and environmental concerns and also the disturbing implications of the future promise of total surveillance societies that 5G and the IoT or Internet of Things look to be destined for without a massive public backlash.  These are all extremely important issues but I would like to focus on other aspects of the disingenuous and misleading way that the technology of 5G is being sold to the public in its initial roll-out at least in the UK and Europe as what one can think of as being Fake 5G.

Firstly it should be pointed out that 5G as such is not currently a stand alone technology but is a hybrid technology that incorporates both 4G Gigabit LTE components and 5G capabilities in principle.  The problem with this is there is no standard definition as to precisely which technologies 5G actually incorporates and different Telcos are offering very different versions of 5G both in the USA and in the UK and Europe.

If we take a strict definition of 5G as being the use of mmWave, very high frequency, high data throughput and extremely low latency radiation spectrum: then this is currently only being partially rolled out by a few and not all of the US carriers and none of these frequencies are currently being used in Europe.  Indeed, the availability of such frequencies have not even been finalized let alone auctioned to telecoms in the UK and Europe as it firstly needs to be decided which bands Europe will harmonise.

https://5g.co.uk/guides/5g-uk-auction/

As indicated above, such frequencies are in use in the USA although this may be questionable in terms of the performance of the 5G roll-out so far in terms of its meeting initial hype and expectations.  In Chicago in the US, both Verizon and Sprint have rolled out what they call 5G services but Verizon are using 26Ghz millimetre (mmWave) frequencies whereas Sprint are using Fake 5G sub-6GHz frequencies which are well within the common range of current 4G LTE tech and also our own dual band home wireless networks which operate in the 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz ranges.  Its all the same underlying tech whether its mobile phone or home WiFi and it all incorporates transmitting and receiving microwave radiation throughout homes, communities and the environment in general.  Your home microwave oven transmits within its enclosure at 2.45Ghz which is very close to the 2.4Ghz of older routers and the lower band of a newer dual band home WiFi router.

As implied above, perhaps the best way to understand these different approaches is by using a definition of Fake 5G and Real 5G where Fake 5G consists of all those implementations that involve use of sub-6GHz frequencies and Real 5G which uses mmWave frequencies in the spectrum of 26GHz to 300Ghz.  Another important thing to understand is that 4G was designed to be implemented as a long term evolution of the technology under the term 4G Gigabit LTE (Long Term Evolution) whereby it was always envisioned that 4G would be able to deliver the Gigabit speeds that 5G is now claiming for itself (4G LTE is already delivering this speed of connection in Australia).  Another part of the problem for anyone analysing the performance of these new networks is that as a hybrid technology we have no real idea as to which tech they are actually using and that just because a phone might display a 5G connection icon that doesn’t mean its using a real 5G connection.  Whilst one can obtain affordable RF meters to measure RF radiation and signal strength in the Sub-8GHz range then meters that can take readings in the 26Ghz plus range cost tens of thousands of dollars so there is no mainstream option to buy a meter and actually measure what tech is being employed at any given site.  Another problem is that many people confuse the 5Ghz signals generated by dual band routers with 5G and assume that it is the same technology.  5G stands for Fifth Generation not 5 Gigahertz.

Most of the industry and media comparisons between 5G and 4G entirely ignore the evolutionary nature of 4G LTE so we regularly find in images such as below, by which comparisons are made in the most strategically advantageous of terms whereby 4G is presented as having a theoretical limit of 100Mbps whereas 5G has a theoretical limit of 10Gbps which is 100 times the apparent download capacity of 4G.