Anyone uploading videos of their scenic hike in a rural area with 5G is exposed to nearly twice the radiation of someone in a city, according to a new study.
Researchers believe the extra radiation stems not from 5G cell towers, but from users’ own mobile devices which work overtime to get out a signal in rural areas.
A team at the Swiss Tropical And Public Health Institute (Swiss TPH), tracked 5G cell phone users’ exposure to radiofrequency electromagnetic fields (RF-EMF) across two cities and three rural communities
RF-EMF are the means by which radio waves transfer energy, allowing wireless devices to communicate across frequencies that include microwave radiation — which under the wrong circumstances can deliver a dangerous amount of energy.
The team found that the average exposure in the rural areas was 29 milliwatts-per-square-meter (mW/sq-m) when uploading, nearly three-times the safety risk threshold recommended by the World Health Organization, 10 mW/sq-m.
That was also much higher than the amount recorded for phones uploading content in the two Swiss cities, for which the team found an average reading of 16 mW/sq-m.
The measurement represents how much radiofrequency energy is passing through a given surface area (like human skin) in the path of these wireless signals.
Anyone uploading rustic pictures of their farm or posting videos of their scenic hike in a rural area with 5G is exposed to nearly twice the radiation of someone in a city, according to a new study. Above, the first 5G ‘Optus’ cell phone tower erected in a suburb of Canberra, Australia
‘In summary, this study shows that environmental exposure is lower when base station density is low,’ said the study’s lead author, epidemiology researcher Adriana Fernandes Veludo.
‘However,’ she added, ‘in such a situation, the emission from mobile phones is by orders of magnitude higher.’
‘This has the paradoxical consequence that a typical mobile phone user is more exposed to RF-EMF in areas with low base station density,’ according to Fernandes Veludo, a PhD student collaborating with the 5G investigation Project GOLIAT.
But Fernandes Veludo also noted that the new findings ‘might underestimate the real exposure’ coming from these 5G cell phones, when operated in rural areas.
While European nations deem such levels as 29 mW/sq-m high, they are well below America’s own more lax threshold limits.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has set the maximum permitted exposure level to 10,000 mW/sq-m.
The rollout of 5G has sparked conspiracy theories that the new form of wireless technology somehow causes Covid-19 or might be even a secret and high-tech new form of mind control.
While the new research out of Switzerland does not weigh-in on the health risks, it does provide new detailed information on what people are being exposed to out in real world scenarios.
In both city and rural area tests, the researchers conducted ‘microenvironment’ comparisons, where different factors come into play, including: residential neighborhoods, industrial areas, schools, public parks and public transit. Above, that data for the ‘maximum upload’ experiment
The possible underestimate stems from how Fernandes Veludo and her colleagues collected their 5G cell phone radiation data in the first place.
The team measured exposures in each of their five test municipalities by traveling to specific locations wearing a backpack with a portable device that measured RF-EMF exposure plus a smartphone equipped with sensors and radiation-tracking software.
‘We have to keep in mind that, in our study, the phone was about 30 cm [11.8 inches] away from the measuring device,’ Fernandes Veludo noted.
‘A mobile phone user will hold the phone closer to the body and thus the exposure to RF-EMF could be up to 10 times higher,’ she said.
The Project GOLIAT team tracked the RF-EMF output from cell phone tower base stations and mobile phone devices in two cities, Zurich and Basel, against three rural towns, Hergiswil, Willisau and Dagmersellen.
In all five areas, they conducted comparison experiments in ‘microenvironments’ where different factors and human behaviors come into play, including: residential neighborhoods, industrial areas, schools, public parks or riding public transit.
But the researchers also ran all of these same experiments while the devices were interacting with the local 5G towers in two other common scenarios.
In the first scenario, the backpacking researchers collected data while the cell phone was in ‘flight mode’ or ‘airplane mode’ — meaning that their sensors were mostly only exposed to ambient signal coming from the 5G cell towers.
The 29 mW/sq-m exposure value was above the safety threshold recommended by the World Health Organization of 10 mW/sq-m – but well below US regulators’ own threshold limits. Above, a summer morning in the rural Swiss village of Zermatt with with views of the Alps
In the other scenario, ‘maximum data download was triggered,’ as opposed to maximum upload, by setting the phone to download large files off the web.
The results from both of these other tests, as published online in the journal Environmental Research in December, were slightly less surprising with the urban areas showing higher exposure to RF-EMF radiation.
The average for their rural test villages came to 0.17 mW/sq-m, while the average for Basel was 0.33 mW/sq-m and for Zurich 0.48 mW/sq-m.
‘The highest levels were found in urban business areas and public transport,’ according to co-author Dr Martin Röösli, a professor of environmental epidemiology at Swiss TPH who specializes in atmospheric physics.
Dr Röösli emphasized that all of these values were ‘still more than a hundred times below the international guideline values.’
In the maximum download scenario, the radiation increased almost uniformly to about 6–7 mW/sq-m, which the Project GOLIAT team noted likely comes from a technique deployed by 5G towers called ‘beamforming.’
As its name implies, ‘beamforming’ redirects and focuses signals from the tower directly at the phone that it is delivering download information to, which leads to more RF-EMF exposure in the process.
The effect was slightly higher in the two cities.
Fernandes Veludo noted this was only the first study of its kind. Future efforts to collect 5G levels in the environment for cell phone users would continue, with repeat studies to be conducted in nine more European nations over the next three years.
