The Times of Israel Publishes “The Green Dilemma of 5G Densification” by Paul Ben-Ishai PhD

“As a physicist, my job involves a lot of reading.  Mainly articles that turn on an obscure point in an obscure field that interests me, the author and maybe one other person – and he’s a physicist too.  Occasionally, one comes across an article that should interest Joe Public, but it is written in such a way that Joe would doze off well before he got to the punch line!  So on my desk landed an article with an impressive title, “Radiation Analysis in a Gradual 5G Network Deployment Strategy” [1]. And this is a doozy!  Even better for me it is written by two Professors from the American University in Beirut, Lebanon, Ahmad El Hajj and Tarek Naous, researchers who could not normally cooperate with an Israeli. Geopolitics divides science too…..

In this article they took a hard look at 5G Densification. “Densification” refers to the placement of many more  antennas for 5G in the urban environment than we have today, in effect making the network of mobile base stations more dense.

They took a typical neighbourhood in Austin Texas covered by the current 4G cellular network.  Using a public database of cellphone towers (http://www.opencellid.org/) they plotted the positions of the existing tower infrastructure and decided to follow the supposed deployment of a new 5G network.  First of all, using the published information of transmission strengths of the 4G antennas they estimated the average exposure felt in the streets of Austin (an excellent title for a Dolly Parton song!).  Then they replaced the 4G with 5G on the existing towers, identified the blind spots in the map where there would be no coverage and added 5G antennas appropriately. Their conclusions were instructive.”