With the transition to new networking technology, some familiar scare stories are reemerging. You might even have seen a few in the comments here. “5G will give you cancer,” “mmWave technology leads to brain tumors,” and “smartphones are microwaving our bodies,” or so the stories go.
It’s all hogwash.
Many of the persistent myths about cell tower radiation still hang over the industry from as far back as the 2G days. Many are wrongly concerned about the dangers even faster 5G technologies. Let’s examine the leading studies and some of these persistent rumors surrounding apparent 5G dangers to put your mind at ease about the safety of mobile technology.
Understanding radiation
Radiation probably makes you think about waste hazards and nuclear bombs. While that’s fair, there are plenty of very safe forms of radiation. In fact, we’re constantly bathing in background radiation, like cosmic rays from the sun.
There’s a major difference between safe radiation and the bad type associated with places like Chernobyl or X-ray machines. This is the difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation. Ionizing radiation appears at wavelengths above ultraviolet light, aka X-rays and gamma rays. These can damage your DNA by knocking electrons out of the base molecules, leading to tumors and cancer.
Lower frequency radio waves, like what’s used for LTE mobile networks, are non-ionizing — they can’t cause the same type of damage. Certain non-ionizing wavelengths can still be bad for you, as they produce heat at extremely high power level. Your microwave can warm up some nasty TV dinners just fine, but it requires more than a thousand watts of power to do so.
The FCC’s safe limit for mobile phones is a specific absorption rate (SAR) of 1.6 watts per kg (1.6 W/kg) of mass, nowhere near enough to warm up your body. Smartphones marketed in the U.S. must demonstrate compliance with this limit before they go on sale. ICNIRP guidelines used in Europe and most other countries set this limit at around 2.0 W/kg. These are the absolute legal limits of exposure. Most of the time the real-world values are significantly lower, especially when we put our phones down.
