What do you think about this airline vs 5G brouhaha?

Wed Jan 19 16:11:37 UTC 2022

> On Jan 18, 2022, at 4:34 PM, Dennis Glatting <dg at pki2.com> wrote:
> 
> What aviation now wants is a 5G exclusion zone around airports, or what
> I sarcastically call "a technology exclusion zone," which tends to be
> businesses and homes. What is aviation going to do when 6G comes along?
> A new WiFi standard is implemented? Any other unforeseen future
> wired/wireless technologies? Or perhaps cell phones should go back to
> Morse Code for aviation's sake?

Clarity is critical to this discussion.

And as usual, the media is obfuscating it. Probably not deliberately this time, but it is happening nonetheless, because the talking heads on TV don’t have the remotest understanding of what is actually happening. Not surprising of course.

This isn’t an OMG 5G! thing whatsoever. It is specifically related to a frequency band that cell carriers are now able to use, which is adjacent or practically adjacent to an existing frequency band used by airplanes to safely land. Yeah, 5G is a fancy-schmancy buzz word but that is not really material to the conversation.

A ROUGH analogy would be something along the lines of - you buy some property and build your dream home there. Across the street is vacant land owned by the city, and the city’s comprehensive plan says it is zoned for recreational use and they plan to put a park there some day. Years go by and one day you wake up to find bulldozers on the empty lot. “Awesome, my grandkids will have a nice park now!” you think. And construction continues. As it nears completion, you realize “Hmmm, that doesn’t really look like a park.” Further investigation uncovers that the city sold the land to a private developer and they are building a brothel and strip club across the street, which will bring massive amounts of vehicular and pedestrian traffic to what for decades was your quiet little street.

You scream and complain to the city council about it. “I built my dream home there because YOU said there would be a nice park with playground equipment and a fishing pond built there some day!” The city says “Yeah, well, sucks to be you. We sold it, tough cookies.”

Of course like any analogy it doesn’t hold up 100 percent, but that’s a way to explain it to non-tech folks.

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Andy Ringsmuth
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andy at andyring.com