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Consumer Behavior
Confused Customers and Bad Weather Ahead
The plan for 5G could restrict our ability to predict extreme weather.
Posted June 5, 2019
As consumers, we are used to problematic claims by mobile phone companies, even if we are uncertain how to deal with them. These confusions have ranged over the years from poor coverage across the country to poor coverage within our homes to inconsistent connection speeds and puzzling payment plans. And a new wrinkle recently appeared that makes it even harder for us to act rationally, as we ponder a transformation from fourth generation telephony (4G) to fifth (5G).
Over the course of three days in January 2019, AT&T spent $73 million to advertise its “5GE” (“5G Evolution”) system in a campaign called “Just OK Is Not OK.” The implication? Its wireless network had surpassed the “just OK” 4G capacities of other wireless phone companies. Four months later, the company settled a lawsuit brought against it by a competitor, Sprint, for falsely advertising “5GE” as true 5G, when in fact it was a just another 4G LTE network. Yet AT&T continues to air its “Just OK Is Not OK” advertisements, but with the tag line “5G Evolution,” a more ambiguous but still misleading association of its products with 5G technology.
If you’ve been following TV and online advertising, you’ll be aware that the deceptive promotion of advances in “fifth generation” wireless technology is not confined to AT&T—all the telecommunications and cable firms have doubled down on marketing 5G phones and networks, even though the actual technology will not be widely available in the U.S. for years. The hype is spreading faster than the development of the technology itself!
But the confusion doesn’t stop there. The lobbying and trade group for the wireless industry, the CTIA, has amplified the propaganda in its campaign for “The Race to 5G.” This not only repeats the promises of faster speeds, interconnected smart machines, and a boom to economic growth and employment. It also argues that the U.S. is in a strategic race with other nation-states to become the world leader in 5G technology.
The rhetorical device of “the race to 5G” has become a key trope in industry propaganda, in regulatory circles, in corporate media, and among U.S. politicians. They frame “the race” in paranoid geo-political language—America faces an existential threat to national and economic security if we don’t maintain our global position as a technology leader. This was the rationale for the Trump administration’s sanctions against Huawei, even as such techno-nationalistic actions could contradictorily advance European firms ahead of the U.S. in the “race to 5G.”
As the propaganda about 5G technology permeates media and political discussions, we forget to ask who benefits from the next generation of mobile technology. There are the usual predictions of lucrative markets and growing employment, with expectations of U.S. “benefits to top $3.5 trillion [and] support 22 million jobs” in the next decade, due in part to a boom in the so-called internet-of-things. But remember the hype about 4G and the generation of hundreds of billions in GDP growth, more jobs, and lower consumer costs? Sure, the U.S. won the race for 4G LTE technology—only to give us one of the slowest and highest priced networks in the world.
And we shouldn’t forget that the U.S. has an oligopoly in the mobile telephony sector. Competition and investment focus on branding, not network infrastructure. This under-investment stunts the fiber backhaul—the high-speed network infrastructure upon which the full potential of 5G depends. Meanwhile, regulators are loath to require phone companies to invest in research and development (Huawei spent nine times what AT&T spent on R&D in 2017).
In the name of the “race to 5G,” U.S. regulators will help advance the interests of the mobile phone industry by carving up and selling off the public airwaves, even if that means harming Americans. In March 2019, the FCC began an auction of the 24-gigahertz frequency band to wireless carriers. The problem is that the 24 GHz band could spill over into the critical 23.8 GHz frequency that weather satellite tracking systems use to measure water vapor in the atmosphere. There’s no other frequency where water vapor can be accurately detected. Forecasters rely on the data from weather satellites to predict how storms and other weather systems will develop.
For this reason, the FCC auction alarmed meteorologists, NASA, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the U.S. Navy—their worry was the potential for 5G’s artificial radiofrequency to distort the transmission of scientific data used in early warnings that inform emergency services in advance so they can prepare and plan to keep people, commerce, maritime traffic, and military operations out of harm’s way.
This concern was reinforced by the FCC’s weak limits on 5G noise spilling into the 23.8 GHz frequency (a kind of buffer zone). Known as “passive band protection limits,” other countries have proposed interference protection from 5G base stations at more than 4000 times what the FCC wants to impose (and none have proposed using the 24GHz band). The acting head of the NOAA told a congressional committee on the environment that the accuracy of satellite measures could be reduced by 30 percent at these protection limits, putting the capabilities of satellites more or less back to where they were in 1980. Once again, the situation is confusing for us, this time in our role as citizens who want safe passage for ourselves and others across waterways, skies, and land. The Federal Government seems irrevocably split over the desire for innovation versus safety, and we are the victims of the race to 5G.
Before the March auction, FCC Chairman, Ajit Pai, rejected appeals from the Commerce Department and NASA for “interagency reconciliation” of the matter. When he couldn’t get support for his position from the NTIA (the National Telecommunications and Information Administration), he went to the State Department for authority to keep other agencies and administrators from postponing the auction and imposing stricter protections on the 23.8 GHz frequency.
A spokesperson for the FCC defended the decision by invoking the “race to 5G” trope: “While our nation’s international competitors would undoubtedly be pleased if we delayed this auction of greenfield spectrum at the last minute, the FCC will move forward as planned so that our nation can win the race to 5G and the American people can quickly enjoy the benefits of the next generation of wireless connectivity.” In December, Pai plans to roll out another auction, this time for bands of frequencies that weather tracking satellites use for detecting rain, snow, atmospheric temperatures, and clouds and ice.
In October and November, the FCC will represent this U.S. “leadership” position on 5G to the World Radiocommunication Conference in Egypt. At this meeting, which the International Telecommunication Union holds every three to four years, an international panel will work out 5G rules, including protection levels of bandwidth used in weather forecasting and atmospheric monitoring. The Trump administration’s obsession with being number one means that U.S. negotiators are likely to fight for a slice of 5G bandwidth that Americans actually need for something more important. With extreme weather events multiplying and intensifying because of the climate crisis, we can’t afford to sacrifice one of the only technological advantages we have in the coming fight for survival.
