PassW0rd – 8th January 2020 (5G: The Fuel of the Future)

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Speaker C: Hello, I’m Peter Warren, and this his password. In this edition of the program, we’re looking into the future of cities. Smart cities, or as one of our interviewees insists on calling them, sensible cities and cities for lovers. There are visions of beautiful, safe, pollution-free places where we can easily move around with no traffic jams. Alternative fuels will replace oil, so there will be no more wars for control of oil-rich territories in the Middle East. But what’s this? Dark clouds are drifting across my crystal ball. Tough questions are being asked about the technology that underpins this utopia. The fifth generation of wireless transmission, or 5G. Will it mean we have to chop down all the trees? What will that mean for global warming? Is it true that 5G will cause brain tumors? Miscarriages, insomnia, or that it may even be responsible for autism. And is a total loss of personal privacy the price we must pay for a data-driven futureville? Andy Stanford-Clark is the Chief Technology Officer for IBM in Britain and Ireland and an IBM Master Inventor, as well as a visiting professor at Newcastle University. He’s optimistic about the smart city model.

Speaker B: So I think what’s going to happen, there’s going to be two levels this is going to happen at. One is public transport, which will become largely autonomous and will enable you to move freely through the city, particularly with joined-up transport, so multimodal transport systems. I, for example, live on the Isle of Wight. I get car, then a ferry, then a bus, then a train. If those were all nicely linked together with a little agent telling me that things were delayed and If I get this train from this platform instead of that one, then I’ll get to so-and-so. That kind of joined-up transport, which with increased autonomy becomes much more possible because you know exactly where things are and you can reschedule and reroute things to avoid traffic problems and so on. That’s one side of it. And then the other side of it is the reduced ownership of cars and the whole new model that poses for car manufacturers. So the whole idea of transport or personal transport as a service rather than owning a car which is going to sit in your driveway for 80% of the time. The whole sort of cars by the hour type model, and it’s more not so much the car you drive but the experience of that transportation, so it’ll become more of the idea of a service of transportation rather than the physical entity that transports you.

Speaker C: It’s an interesting thing, isn’t it? Because the car companies are looking at this principle of shared ownership. The oil companies are also looking into this. They’re thinking of buying great big fleets of cars that are constantly in circulation. Because as you say, you know, according to the RAC, we only use our cars for 6% of the time. That’s going to have some incredible changes though, isn’t it? Because the car has been or the carriage as it once was. It’s been a tremendous part of our lives. I mean, this is a tremendous status object. All of that’s going to go.

Speaker B: I think we’re already seeing that now. If you look at, like, our children’s generation, then they don’t aspire to own the biggest car that they possibly can. I remember when I first got my promotion and got a company car, I think, oh, what, how big a company car can I get? Whereas my children, not interested in owning a car, they just rent a car when they’re going to go away for the weekend, and they get public transport the rest of the time. So I think that massive change is already happening, and certainly with spiraling oil prices and recognition that the oil is going to become more expensive and start to run out, and it’s a finite fossil fuel, people start to look at ownership of electric vehicles and hydrogen vehicles. In that landscape of the gas guzzler is very much changing. In fact, we’re seeing it already. People are now buying vehicles for the miles per gallon, or indeed hybrids and electric vehicles, rather than what’s the 0-60 time as we might have done 20 years ago.

Speaker C: Ford were talking, well, must be about 20 years ago, 25 years ago, about these cars that they said, you know, you’re going to go away on holiday, so you get from Ford a couple of things that you bolt onto your car that you just need when you’re going to go away on holiday, and then you give them back to Ford when you don’t want them. In a sense, we could be moving into this world of modules where you say, yes, I’m going to go away on holiday, so you get 3 cars that are joined together that just roll up and you fill them up.

Speaker B: You could do. I think that was probably very early thinking in this space. I think in reality it’ll be public transport first and then sort of 2 sizes of car to go on top of that. So one, it’ll be the kind of the very small 1 or 2 person car, and then the third size will be the family car with room for the dogs and the deck chairs and everything to go on holiday in. And you’ll just take temporary ownership of that in the rental sense for whatever time you need them for.

Speaker C: And in terms of automation though, then that must be a slightly tertiary stage. We interviewed the Association of British Insurers about this. They said that they think that there is going to be this tertiary stage between automated vehicles and manual vehicles. That’s the bit that really scares them— people actually working with sort of automated vehicles. That’s when they think there will be lots of accidents. But I mean, in terms of this degree of automation, that this world that you’re talking about with public transport, how much of a car will I as a person own, or will any of my 4 children Probably very little.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Well, I think we’ve covered that with the transport as a service, but I think what’s really interesting with that automation point is that certainly some huge challenges in the AI still, particularly even sort of the vision processing part of it. If you’ve ever been to a mini roundabout where 4 people are sitting looking at each other, wondering who’s gonna blink first and go, you’ll realize that it’s not just about sensing where cars are. There’s a whole load of subtle of body language and eye contact, which we’re ages away from in terms of computers understanding that. And I think this idea, this tertiary phase that you’re talking about, where humans and autonomous vehicles, human-driven autonomous vehicles are cohabiting on the roads, is a long way off to be done safely. I think what we’ll see before that though is in the same way as we have a bus lane and a taxi lane, in cities today. You’ll have an AV lane, autonomous vehicle lane, where the autonomous vehicles will be able to go sort of joined right up, nose to tail, centimeter apart, going at 90 miles an hour, and we’ll all be left in the remaining lanes fighting it out as we do today. And I don’t think the, the mix of those two systems is going to be very healthy at all. So I think we’re a long way off that yet, but I think that we will have that middle ground, and I think those autonomous pods or vehicles will be the public transport system and taxis initially.

Speaker C: An AV lane with self-driving lorries thundering along at high speed 1 centimetre apart sounds frankly terrifying. It’s a far cry from my own idea of transport modules that can fit together in different configurations depending on how many people are travelling and their special needs. And it’s important to realise that this is not science fiction. It’s not even blue-sky thinking. We are already well on the way to the smart city here in London. We’re currently second in the Gigabit magazine world leaderboard of city smartness, behind New York but ahead of Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, Reykjavik, and Singapore. So we need to wake up and become smart citizens to steer the new development so that we humans get a better experience. At least, that’s the view of Professor Carlo Ratti, director of the Senseable City Lab at the world-famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT. Oh, and it’s called Senseable. Because it relies on sensors to track our movements and even our moods. Not because it’s sensible like a stout pair of walking shoes. I spoke to Carlo Ratti a year ago, and what he told me already seems prophetic.

Speaker E: Mobility is one of the things that’s going to change a lot in the next few years, exactly because of what we were saying, because of IoT, Internet of Things. Think about new developments such as autonomous cars. The interesting thing about autonomous cars is that you don’t need to own a car anymore, you just get one when you need it. And also today a car is used on average 5% of the time. 95% of the time, not only is it not used, but actually it uses valuable space in our cities. So if you can change a little bit those percentages, the impact for instance on parking spaces in cities could be massive. Or think about other changes with mobility, what’s happening, what are called the dockless city bikes that are now in cities all over the world. Think about some of the recent experiments we are seeing with on-demand scooters, electric scooters, and so on. So there are just some examples of how Internet of Things is changing the mobility landscape. And you know what? When mobility gives us more opportunities, then the important thing is What type of quality of life do we want to achieve? And when you look at that, of course, you want to see a city that’s built less for the motor car and more for citizens and lovers, as Lewis Mumford used to say.

Speaker C: Okay, so good. It sounds like a lovely image of the city. Does that mean that the city will become quieter? Does it mean, you know, obviously pollution is a real big factor, and we’ve seen that in Los Angeles, and now legislation in the UK is aimed at eradicating the terrible pollution that we have in London. We’re going to see a quieter, cleaner city using technology.

Speaker E: Look, again, it depends on, you know, the decisions we will make. You know, potentially we could, especially with electrification. The good thing is that, you know, electrification now is proceeding at a fast pace. For the first time, I think last year, the cost of producing energy in a sustainable way using photovoltaics became the cheapest of all energy sources in a few countries. We are talking about $20, $25 per megawatt-hour. So I think if we play it right, we could have a city with more electric cars, with less vehicles overall because we use them better by sharing them. And so potentially, yes, a more quieter city. But again, it’s our decision. I’m going to give you another example where we might get a city that’s even more congested and noisy. And that’s, you know, that for instance, if self-driving cars are going to be so cheap that people don’t want to use mass transportation anymore, then we might end up with many more vehicles on the road and with much more congestion. And again, you know, technology means we’ve got more opportunities. It’s up to us to decide what type of city we want to live in tomorrow.

Speaker C: But that’s one of the interesting things, isn’t it? Because you say It’s up to us. Well, where do we go to vote for that sort of city? Where does that decision get made? It doesn’t seem to me that there’s any place to actually manifest your view on this at the moment.

Speaker E: Well, I think there is, but let me tell you, this is not something that— this is something we all need to do together. For instance, what we try to do both at MIT, at Senseable City Lab, our lab at MIT, also with our design office, Carlo Ratti Associati, what we try to do is do projects that can show different dimensions of how cities could be tomorrow. And that’s the first step in order to start a conversation. You know, the conversation, the discussion we’re having now, it’s really through media. A lot of people will get exposed to new ideas about the city and form their opinion. And then ultimately, it’s also up to us how we vote for politicians in order to vote for a vision of the city city tomorrow or a different one, more cars or less cars, or, you know, how we use also traditional methods, which are politics, in order to decide what type of city we want.

Speaker C: But we don’t actually see technology being put on manifestos at the moment, do we? You know, we don’t see politicians saying, I’m standing on a platform of bringing in a much, much nicer city for people to live in.

Speaker E: Well, I think we are. For instance, if you think about the mayor of Paris, we’ve been working with I’ve been working closely with her over the past few years. When she decided to ban diesel engines, that was a very strong political decision. In the same way as the decision in Paris to close down a lot of the urban highways next to the river, that was a very strong political decision. Citizens then are going to decide if they want to reelect her because of this or if they want to vote for somebody else. I see that these changes are really crucial to what a city is. You know, to bring the city— something that for 10,000 years ago has been bringing us together as citizens to exchange ideas, to exchange goods, and so on. So, you know, this very idea of the city, I see it’s more and more part of the political agenda.

Speaker C: It’s certainly true that freedom of movement, taking back control, and fighting— literally with warplanes— for energy security are dominant themes for politicians. But on the other side, popular support is growing for Extinction Rebellion, Fridays for Future, and green transport options. Take car parking. That has to be one of the most stressful and expensive aspects of city life. Peter O’Driscoll is the UK country manager for Ringo, an app that apparently solves a problem saving time, money, and pollution.

Speaker F: Yes, so to give you some background and some context, why would a vehicle manufacturer be interested in a parking app? Looking at Ringo in isolation or other brands across Europe, the reason being is they, they want to have a much better experience for the user. They’re interested in what’s called the connected car experience. So if you look at car ownership 20 years ago, someone born in the 1970s and 1960s, when they came to buy a vehicle It was about how fast can it go, it was about stereo, did it have electric windows. If you talk to a millennial about buying a car, the first thing they say is, “Why do I need to own a car if you’re in a city?” Second thing they say is, “Does it have Wi-Fi?” So the future generation of car owners, the millennial generation, are really focused on the connected experience. So part of that is about bringing services into the car. Dashboard or into the connected car, whether that be Spotify, your music, whether it be text, you know, all your text services. You can speak into your car and send a text message, whether it’s getting your emails read out to you, navigating to a hotel, undertaking a booking. The other part in that linkage is everything ends in a parking session. Now that parking session could be on your drive, in which case you need to pay for it. It could be in a garage,. It could be on street, or it could in probably 1 in 7 journeys, 1 in 8 journeys, be a pay-for-parking session that you need to undertake. So it makes sense for a user experience to connect that service up. That is just kind of quite a commoditized approach to it. What I mean by that is that’s a single-service approach. If you look at where we enhance that approach for the user, we collect significant amounts of data points through the static data we collect where people are parking. We’re capturing the vehicle type in terms of the fuel emissions, we’re capturing the age of the vehicle, and we’re also capturing things like whether it’s an electric vehicle or not. This is really useful information for the vehicle manufacturers because they can start getting from our data points the ability to see where people are parking and then start informing their users where parking space is available. So Ring launched in 2016 space availability in our product. So if you go onto the Ringo app, the first screen you see is the nearest locations to you and space availability in those areas. If you’re thinking about reducing congestion, there’s various figures quoted ranging from 20 to 30% of a vehicle’s journey time is spent circling looking for parking space once they’re in an area. You can quote figures galore, but reality is if you arrive somewhere and you can’t see what’s available, you will circle. And people are habitual as well. They always go to the place they always go to. I can guarantee you that when you go to your Sainsbury’s or Tesco supermarket, if that’s what you still do, if you don’t shop online, you’ll park in one of probably 4 spaces. If you go to a multi-story car park, depending on who you are, but most people tend to park near the lift. They’ll go up 2 or 3 floors to find that near the lift spot. Now translate that into our world where we’re dealing with both the off-street estate, and by that I mean anything that’s not roadside or the kerbside, If you can influence where people go by space availability, you can also then support councils potentially in their pricing policy and also where vehicles drive to.

Speaker C: Where you’re going across the city, finding the best route to take requires a transaction. You give out your personal data, and in return, the smart app gives you the information you need in real time. One of those smart systems is TomTom, the sat-nav. Other sat-navs are available, of course. TomTom’s head of navigation, Heiko Schilling, based in Birmingham, believes data is the key that will unlock our utopian future.

Speaker G: If you think cars and think how become— what roles can play— cars can play in a smart city, then it comes down first and foremost that you need to understand where your infrastructure is. So that’s your road network in the city. So you need to understand what’s— there’s things like conditions of your road network. So we have cities that we, based on our data, we can give them feedback on surfaces of their road network, right? So letting them know where there’s construction sites, letting them know where there’s issues with potholes or any infrastructure issues, right? And with their traditional means, they are not able to actually do that. They’re not able to operate that infrastructure that efficiently, right? So sometimes they don’t even know where there are construction sites in their cities, right? So it’s that level of non-understanding. If you now have data where you can give to the City of London, say, “Dear London Mayor, this is where all your construction sites are at this moment in time,” we can optimize traffic around that, or we can just by having that data, it’s already helpful. That’s a little bit making London a little bit more smarter, right? So that’s the sort of smartness or smart cities that I would think is happening and will happening a lot more.

Speaker C: But there’s an issue there, isn’t there? Because the issue is how much of that information about your life you want to share with people. You have to make some decisions about how much transparency you’re going to force from people.

Speaker G: Yes, I very much agree. And I cannot speak for other companies, so how they deal with that, right? So, so the way we do this in TomTom is essentially that we’ve been always quite clear on that the data that we’re using, we are not interested who is driving, we’re just interested on how fast you’re driving there, for for instance, right? So, and we want to feed that data back to just feed it back to improve the actual product as you use it, right? So we are not using that data to send that to, I don’t know, advertisement or any other insights that also would be useful, admittingly, right? So, but as a user, it becomes increasingly more complex and increasingly less understandable where else your data is used.

Speaker C: But then how about another potential conflict, which is that there’s a row going on at the moment about facial recognition technology. The police are pushing ahead with facial technology even though there’s quite a lot of opposition. You’re going to be seeing people who are speeding. Surely the police would say, hang on, there’s someone who’s committed a crime, we want you to give us that data.

Speaker G: Yes. That’s a good point, Pete. And in fact, that was a mistake we made in the past, right? So we simply didn’t anticipate that use case, right? So now in hindsight, it sounds very obvious, right? So why didn’t you guys see this beforehand? So the mistake we made is that we actually sold some of the historic speech data that we measured. We sold that to the Dutch police, and the Dutch police used it for exactly that use case that you described, right? So they analyzed the data, looked at where there is on average speeding, so driving above the legal limit, and they used that data then to place mobile speed cameras there. So which created a bit of an outcry in the Dutch press. And as a consequence, we just said we withdrew the supply to the Dutch police, right?

Speaker C: So we canceled the contract. But the thing is that there is a slightly mixed position there, isn’t there? The Dutch police can quite rightly say that they bought that data for proper use and that they’re all they’re doing is they’re imposing the laws that everybody’s agreed should be imposed and you’re not helping them.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker G: So the thing is that you have to be clear about the use cases where that data is being used, right? So I think you can’t prevent that data is being used to make things more efficient, right? So that’s just a fact of, of what, whatever is possible is is being done, right? So, but I think where you can restrict is what are the different use cases where your data is being used, right? And this is where it comes down to. So in the example of Dutch police, we now anticipate that as a use case and we explicitly forbid it as a use case where we don’t want to have that data being used, right? So simply because we feel like that’s a step too far in using data which was not originally captured for that purpose. And there’s a lot of other use cases. For instance, when I’m searching on a website, I don’t want to have my search data, so the points or the things that I’m using or search for, suddenly appearing as advertisement when I go on my mobile phone, right? So, or go in any other application where I didn’t expect that, right? So I don’t want to have my data basically wandering around across many different use cases and suddenly create scenarios that compromise a lot more of my privacy than I agreed on upfront. And that’s something that we as TomTom are always quite clear on, that we only take that data to improve the map product. So that data, whatever GPS data we’re capturing there, so the data that I described is just used to increase the map data and the product itself that you are using then. So therefore you get a one-to-one relationship as a user. So if I send my consent that this data is being used, then I get a better mapping product back, and, and that in return is something I can understand as a user, right? So, and I think that way around it makes sense.

Speaker C: Heiko Schilling. He uses the hashtag #trafficisevil, so you can follow his quest for a free-flowing cityscape on Twitter. You’ll find me tweeting @petewarren and also on Future Intelij. I didn’t have enough letters to get Future Intelligence on there. And I’m here on the second Wednesday of every month with Password on Resonance FM, where DJ Ritu is up next with A World in London. As I said earlier, London is at number 2 in the chart of the world’s smartest cities. That might seem unlikely and perhaps rather annoying if you’re stuck in a traffic jam right now, but cities don’t just get smart overnight. They evolve, and apps like Ringo, TomTom, and Turo are all playing a part in that evolution. Turo is a global car-sharing app supported by Allianz Insurance, and Xavier Collins is the UK CEO.

Speaker A: One of the, you know, macro trends that I would love to contribute towards, you know, we would like to try and achieve through Turo is the reduction in car ownership or the reduction in the need for car ownership. And so when we think about this problem, take a city like London, there’s lots of mobility solutions now depending on the different type of use case you could have. So You know, we’ve seen the rise of these e-bikes with Lime and companies like Jump, which are solving the 0 to kind of 3-kilometer range problem. You’ve also got one of the best underground infrastructures in the world that solve the 3 to 8-kilometer problem. But when you look at some of the larger journeys, it’s in Greater London, only about 16% of trips over 8 kilometers actually have a good public transport solution. And so where we see Turo fitting is solving that last probably 20% of travel use cases where people need access to a vehicle. But given that, you know, 80% of travel use cases can now be solved through an app, either by taking the underground or by taking a bike or something like that, or by walking, what we’re trying to do is facilitate this world in which You no longer need a car, but when you want access to one, you can book it through an app.

Speaker C: Isn’t this going to have an impact though on a lot of other infrastructure? I mean, for example, in Helsinki they discovered that they had more parking spaces than they had space for children’s playgrounds. So what this is going to do surely is reduce the amount of parking.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think at a macro scale it has the real opportunity to free up our cities, not just London but across the UK. So it’s kind of one of those things that’s really interesting to think about, but when you actually start to size the problem and you realize that there’s 40 million cars sitting idle 95% of the time and that parking, you know, roughly takes up between 15 to 30% of urban areas, it leaves a lot of room for thought around, you know, why have we structured things this way and how could we be doing it better? And so, you know, I think part of our vision is if we can start to unlock the potential of sharing, you will see the need for less cars, but those cars being used more efficiently, and as a result, more space being freed up, particularly in our urban areas, for other things. From an owner, from a car owner’s perspective, the average owner in London, for example, is making about £500 a month sharing their car between 8 to 12 days a month when they’re not using it. And so we’ve got lots of stories now from owners in London. We have, we hold community events where people come along and we’re seeing that actually this, this marketplace is giving them a whole new level of financial freedom. They can use, you know, this kind of separate stream of income to help pay rent, to invest in hobbies, or to take holidays. And so just to kind of make the point clear from an owner perspective, the whole point is there shouldn’t really be any downside in doing this. If you think about it, even from the cost of car ownership perspective, the average loan payment in the UK on a car is £250. And as I said, the average earnings are about $500. So given that Turo works hard to ensure that the cars are covered by our insurance policy, we run the marketing, we create the platform, and we connect the owner with the user, this really is just about setting up a stream of income. We’re not necessarily focused on very quick intercity trips. You know, we’re not a Zipcar-type model where someone’s booking a car for an hour. And driving that car around the city, or we’re not an Uber model where, you know, someone’s signing up to drive for Uber and is doing lots and lots of miles. We’re far more akin to, you know, an Airbnb where someone could be traveling over from the US, landing in Scotland, and wanting to drive around the Highlands. And so they can land at Edinburgh Airport, meet with a local, get their car, and then drive off for a week, but for a lot of that time, you know, the car’s not being driven from point A to point B. It’s actually one long journey and then staying in a hotel or an Airbnb or something like that.

Speaker C: As we’ve heard, the smart city solutions to mobility, congestion, and pollution can be as simple as an app in your phone backed by a means of checking your identity and paying. But that means that huge volumes of data must be constantly flowing around in real time. And that’s why the tech industry is rolling out a fifth generation of wireless connectivity in order to cope with the ever-increasing data traffic that is meant to be helping to eradicate our real-world traffic jams. But does that mean that we need these new data roads? Maury Rumney runs a telecoms consultancy in Edinburgh. And he’s a wireless and cellular expert. I asked him, do we need 5G?

Speaker H: Largely, it’s, it’s the industry needs to generate new income streams, and particularly the vendors. So a lot of the push towards this latest generation has been vendor-led, where they are looking to take the latest advances in technology and package them into something which has a name, in this case 5G. There isn’t a huge difference technically between 4G and 5G, certainly at the radio level. It’s very much an evolution of what we already have. But the way it’s been packaged in this 5G format is primarily a marketing tool to get people’s attention and to drive them to, you know, to take on something new. Now whether the services that are on offer in the shorter term are going to be sufficient to generate the demand that’s needed to pay for all this, that’s very much unclear at this point.

Speaker C: Is this just exercise in selling phones? I mean, from what you’re saying, 5G isn’t going to be such a dramatic increase. It sounds as though it’s the phone manufacturers who want to keep saying, hey, here’s the latest telephone, it goes really fast. And there’s so much more you can do on it.

Speaker H: I’d say there’s a fair bit of that going on. I mean, as I said earlier, there is a reason why we need to keep evolving the technology. Certainly the capacity that you get by introducing new frequencies is valuable. That didn’t have to be using 5G technology. We could have put 4G in these new frequency bands. There’s no technical reason why we couldn’t. Where you get the big change in what is potentially possible is in the millimeter wave frequencies. Now, this is an area where, in theory, there’s a huge amount of spectrum available, and it would be possible to do much more than we can do today, and that’s something that’s being trialed at the moment in the US and some other Asian countries. However, whether or not those systems are effective at these millimeter wave frequencies is something that is very much unclear at this point. So although the theory is there as to what could be done, It may turn out not to be as commercially successful as people would, would like to think.

Speaker C: Okay, so it seems 5G is not totally essential to the smart city. And in the case of autonomous cars, it wouldn’t work anyway because it’s a cellular network. So the cars would lose connectivity as they entered and left each cell, potentially causing chaos. Or, as no mobile network can provide total coverage,, they would grind to a halt. An issue that can be solved using a mix of existing technology like built-in car hard drives and some new technologies that have recently been developed.

Speaker H: Maury Rumney again. Well, I guess the initial launch of something always attracts the most attention, and then after that, people actually try and use whatever it is that they are being offered, and there will be the early adopters, of course, who will go out and buy the latest products and, and try them. But 5G at this point in time is really only a capacity play for mobile broadband in the UK. There are things that it may become in the future, but in the short term, it’s mainly a feature that is going to allow network operators to offer more of the same in certain areas which may be congested 4G networks where there’s not enough capacity. With 5G, it’s less clear that the benefits are going to be things that people are going to notice. So there is a— and the reason for that is largely it’s that the industry needs to generate new income streams, and particularly the vendors. So a lot of the push towards this latest generation has been vendor-led, where they are looking to take the latest advances in technology and package them into something which has a name, in this case 5G. There isn’t a huge difference technically between 4G and 5G, certainly at the radio level. It’s very much an evolution of what we already have. But the way it’s been packaged in this 5G format is primarily a marketing tool to get people’s attention and to drive them to you know, to take on something new. Now, whether the services that are on offer in the shorter term are going to be sufficient to generate the demand that’s needed to pay for all this, that’s very much unclear at this point.

Speaker C: Okay, so what you seem to be saying is that we don’t really need 5G, but I thought that one of the reasons that we needed 5G was for our new automated cars, for our new connected world, for our new smart cities?

Speaker H: The connected car, I mean, this is an interesting one. People talk about the holy grail of motoring, which is the autonomous car, the one that you can dial up and it will come to where you are and take you to where you want to go and you don’t need to do anything. And the key to that technology is the word autonomous because If something is autonomous, it’s not relying on anything else. In particular, it’s not relying on the cellular network. So the holy grail of automation, which is this autonomous vehicle that can drive you anywhere, is not reliant on cellular wireless technology, certainly not on 5G. And the reason is that wireless networks, cellular networks, are not ubiquitous. You can go to places where they don’t exist, or you can have issues with coverage, you can have dropouts, you can have capacity problems, and there’s no way that you can hand over the critical task of driving a car on the back of a wireless network which doesn’t have the reliability required for such a task. So the things that are enabling the evolution in cars are local wireless technologies like 77 GHz millimeter-wave radar and optical sensors that can read the road and locally make decisions on what needs to be done in, in a very short space of time. So that’s what’s enabling the current automotive industry innovations, and there’s some really good stuff going on there. But you can augment the navigational aspects and safety aspects of some of this technology with additional features which are delivered by the cellular network.. And there is indeed a lot of work going on in standards right now to add vehicular connectivity into the standards. And that’s happening right now. It’s been happening with 4G LTE for a while, and it’s also now happening with, with 5G. And there’s a lot of work to develop new technologies, for instance, a sidelink, which is the ability of one car to communicate with another, and also with roadside services so that you can build up a network of auxiliary features which enable you to have a better driving experience. Things like pedestrian collision avoidance or warning of a problem at a traffic junction if somebody’s skipped a red light or something. There are things that could be done if you had low-latency communications between vehicles. But those are in addition to the basics of autonomous driving, which I think is what people tend to think about.

Speaker C: When you talk about 5G and cars. So 5G may just be a marketing gimmick to sell more tech. And there are some who claim that rather than being beneficial, it may have some very negative side effects. A growing number of towns and cities are refusing to allow 5G to roll out within their boundaries because of health, legal liability, and environmental concerns. The Belgian capital Brussels is one of them. Environment Minister Celine Fremont said that she was not prepared for her citizens to become the guinea pigs in a telecommunications experiment. What does Maury Rumney think?

Speaker H: Is 5G safe? Well, there’s two major camps to this whole debate. There’s the industry and the regulators that have got rules. For how much exposure to RF radiation is considered safe. And those rules are based on thermal effects. In other words, they are trying to limit the radiation exposure such that there is no effect on heating on the body, and the threshold for that is somewhere less than 1°C. So those are pretty much how the limits are set, and there are different limits for handsets there are limits for base stations which are slightly different, but the principle is the same. We’re trying to limit the exposure to some level, and if I were to put it in layman’s terms, that level is roughly 1% of the strength of sunlight. So if you can imagine what it’s like being exposed to full sunlight, that’s on the sort of typical value on the Earth’s surface is about 1,000 watts per square meter. Or kilowatt per square meter. We all know what that feels like, and we have some sense of what that’s like. So the limits for radio are 1% of that, so 100 times less than the heat that we get off the Sun. And I’m talking here purely about the heat, not— I’m not getting into the issues about ionizing radiation like UVA and UVB from the Sun, which we know causes cancer. I’m purely talking here about the heat from the sun, and the radio limits are set to 1% of that. And presumably that’s on a sunny day. Yeah, I think that’s probably— yeah, obviously, if you’re behind a cloud, you’re going to get less. But I think the average exposure on the Earth’s surface is about 1,000 watts per square meter without cloud cover. So that’s what sets the limits, and all of the systems that we’re talking about here are operating well inside those limits. But there’s another group of people, scientists, some medical people, who have been investigating the biological effects of radiofrequency radiation for many years, and they feel that they now have evidence that suggests that the limits which have been set since 1998— I think these limits came in— that those limits are actually not necessarily safe. And there’s quite a lot of scientific papers, peer-reviewed published papers, which suggest that there are biological effects, and some suggest that there are health effects. And there’s a lot of people behind this, this body of research that are saying now’s the time to rethink what we’re doing about safety limits. And because 5G has come along at the same time that this realization has happened, the two have sort of caused an event in terms of 5G getting blamed for being unhealthy, when actually, in actual fact, most of the research and all the experience, of course, is with older systems. So it’s not 5G as such that’s driving the health concern, but it certainly caused it to become a more— it’s got a new sort of face to it because 5G is new. Whether or not there is actually any safety concerns is hugely contested because the industry and the regulators are basically saying, we don’t think this research is telling us anything of problem, of a concern. And yet there are quite a large number of academics and medics who would say the contrary and say that we’re now past the point where there’s enough research to say We think there are problems and we need to be— need to start addressing how we minimize exposure and also consider changing the limits.

Speaker C: So, a note of caution there from industry insider Maury Rumney. Opponents of 5G are far more vocal. Claire Edwards, who worked on 5G among other things in her former job as an editor of the United Nations has no doubt in her mind that it must be stopped.

Speaker D: My only criticism is really— my main focus of criticism is wireless technology and mobile phones. That’s my focus. The rest of it I think can be made a great deal safer if you can persuade people to cable their computers and cable their tablets, then we would be a lot safer than we are at the moment. The fact is that we’ve had this wireless technology which is ubiquitous microwave radiation throughout the planet for the last 25 years, which has caused these devastating health effects. So we have the proof of the health effects, and now the proposal is to make it at least 100 times worse with a very, very dangerous technology, which is unlike previous wireless technologies because it’s beamforming, which makes it especially concentrated and dangerous. So I’m absolutely pro-technology. I don’t have a problem with technology, and I think to a great degree automation, we need the communication. As long as we can keep control of it and keep it safe, I think it’s absolutely fine. What has to go is mobile phones and wireless technology because it’s killing us.

Speaker C: So is this why so many cities and towns are deciding to ban this technology? Because it’s untested or because they can see some health effects?

Speaker D: Yes, absolutely. And also I think they may be waking up to the realization that they may be personally liable for rolling out this technology. 62 entities and municipalities in the United States have brought suits against the Federal Communications Commission. Switzerland, you have suits. The Netherlands, you have suits. Denmark. There’s a group called the Irregulators in the United States that has challenged the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, for not appropriately using the $1 trillion that was given to them for enabling the 5G rollout and actually redirecting that into other projects. You’ve— oh, by the way, you’ve got 100 municipalities in Italy that have adopted moratoria. You’ve got several cantons in Switzerland. You’ve got mayors in Austria and Germany have come out against it. You’ve got several local authorities in Britain and Ireland have adopted moratoria. The Belgian environment minister has refused to trial 5G in Brussels. I mean, I have a list of 30 countries where the opposition to this is really massive.

Speaker C: Okay, now as well as the possible biological effects, are there other downsides to this technology?

Speaker D: Well, nobody has yet shown me any upsides. I mean, this is so mad, it beggars belief. You know, I call this 5G is a planetary-scale mind and physical surveillance, control, and kill grid.

Speaker C: Right. Okay. I mean, some people are saying, hang on, it’s going to have environmental impact because for some of the 5G systems to work. They’re actually very, very finely grained in terms of the receptors, and you’re going to have to cut down trees and cut branches of trees so that you can actually get them working, particularly if you’re going to use them on automated vehicles, for example.

Speaker D: That’s exactly it. There was a white paper from the University of Surrey, I believe. They talked about these signals being cut by foliage by about 70%. So this is the proof that the intention is to cut down all these trees. I have evidence that in many, many countries they have been chopping down perfectly healthy trees, and this is obviously for the 5G agenda. Also, in terms of trees, a scientist has pointed out that trees, when subjected to microwave radiation, they produce the same kind of substance that they produce when they’re attacked by insects, and this substance is inflammable. So this might be an explanation for all these fires that we’re seeing all over the place.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker D: Is there a perception that the technology companies are forcing technology on us for their own ends? Absolutely not. No, no, no. It’s not a perception. It’s a fact. It’s a regulatory hijack and a conspiracy by industry and the military to introduce this technology by force, and it’s being channeled through the UN. The media doesn’t even cover a whisper of the downside to 5G because they’re either owned or controlled or in partnership with the telecommunications companies, and the regulatory agencies have been accused of conflicts of interest so many times it’s hard to keep track. Budgets, military budgets were cut at the end of the Cold War, but they wanted to keep developing weapons that involve microwave radiation. And so what has happened is, and the same thing I would argue has happened with NASA, that you’ve opened up, you’ve encouraged commercial companies to, to go into partnership with the military such that the military can have these technological developments, but they’re marketed as consumer technologies, and thereby the military weapons are subsidized by the public. So this is again fact, and you’ll find it in the literature.

Speaker B: Sure.

Speaker C: No, no, no, I mean, it’s a technology adoption that the military call commercial off the shelf. Thank you for clearing that up. Now, there is this argument from politicians and technologists that 5G is essential to deal with the problems that we’re now facing, that we need AI, that we need automated vehicles, that we need the Internet of Things to deal with climate change and our aging population.

Speaker D: Well, it certainly would be very effective, you know, in terms of its capacity for depopulation and enforced sterility. Certainly solve those problems, and I could recommend it, you know. But we’re going to answer this sensibly. That’s absolutely indefensible because this would make climate change exponentially worse, and it would introduce such phenomenal astronomical rates of dementia and neurological diseases and indeed autism that actually health services would not be able to cope with this. So for a start, you have potential exponential increases in the use of energy. Again, this is very well documented. There was a YouTube video, a music video, just last year which had 5 billion clicks, and that consumed as much energy as 40,000 homes. You had a report from Japan the year before last which said that data centers would use as much energy as the country currently used at that time. So, you know, this is not going to help climate change. It’s going to make it a great deal worse. Then you’re talking about cutting down millions of trees, and of course the trees are actually helping with the CO2 problem. So I don’t see how that’s going to help climate change.

Speaker C: There have been demonstrations against 5G in cities across Europe.— with 500 protesters turning out in the German capital Berlin, where the new technology is being tested in an experimental corridor. And in Britain, the local authorities at Brighton and Hove and Glastonbury and Frome have banned the rollout. A number of Native American tribes, led by the United Kitawah Band of Cherokee Indians, have together mounted a legal challenge to 5G infrastructure on their land. But are the health and safety concerns really well founded? Dr. Frank de Voigt is an epidemiologist in the public health lab at Bristol University. His latest peer-reviewed research report found the statistics proved there had been a rise of around one-third in the instance of brain tumors in the UK over the past 20 years. But since most of the additional cases occurred in older subjects aged over 75, he concluded that mobile phone use was unlikely to be the cause. Still, Dr. De Voigt told me there are other studies that seem to indicate a link to cancer.

Speaker I: Yeah, I, uh, I, I am aware of those reports. Mostly that seems to be an overinterpretation of what’s actually produced, what’s actually available. Many studies don’t look at— just look at exposure alone, assume that exposure means health effects, which is not correct. Many of the peer-reviewed data that indicates, for example, a carcinogenic effect of mobile phone use are from the same study, from the same research group in Sweden, while most of the other groups show either no increased effect or have an indication that there may be an increased effect for the highest and most frequent users of mobile phones. But for those people, they can’t exclude other reasons for observing these effects. So that’s in human populations. And then in animal studies, the biggest study is called the NTP study in rats done in the US. And there you find very strange effects. For one thing, you find very few cancers to begin with, and then you find very weird differences between male and female animals where you only find effect in males, while you also see that the exposed animals live longer than the non-exposed animals. So there’s a lot of things that are still up in the air a little bit, and the International Agency for Research on Cancer classified mobile phone radiation as possible human carcinogens, Class 2B, which I think is the best summary of the available evidence, and it says that the available— the strength of the available evidence is, is quite weak, but we can’t fully exclude it.

Speaker C: Okay, so what you’re saying is that a lot of different information seems to be being put together and the different conclusions are being drawn from this than, say, a health expert would come to.

Speaker I: Yes, that’s more or less what I’m saying. So, so my, my worry with these kind of discussions is if you want to know the true health effects on humans, if any, what you’d like to do is called a randomized controlled trial. And you’d, you’d randomize some people to get an exposure, another group of comparable, or comparable group of people to not having the exposure, and follow them up and you’d see whether the exposed group would have more cancers, for example, after a certain amount of time. But you can’t do these kind of studies because it’s unethical. So what you end up doing is observing people just in their normal day-to-day life, and you estimate their exposure, and then after a given amount of time, you compare the diseases that have occurred in the high versus the low group. That’s called observational epidemiology, and because you don’t control a lot in these studies, there’s a lot of potential for bias and confounding and other kinds of factors that could explain any observed associations. That’s why, as epidemiologists, we tend not to look at single studies, but we look at all the available scientific evidence so that we can even out the problems and the errors that are inherent in all studies. And then in the end, we come to a balanced conclusion. And that’s, for example, what the International Agency for Research on Cancer’s evaluation of Class 2B, so possible human carcinogen, what that is based on. And what’s very dangerous is to pick single studies that, for example, show large effects or strange effects or things we haven’t seen before and draw very strong conclusions from them. And it’s my worry or my interpretation of this that that’s kind of what happened or what’s going on in this particular situation.

Speaker C: As Frank de Waal says, the World Health Organization classifies mobile phone use as a Class 2B carcinogen. For comparison, Class 1 cancer-causing substances are cigarettes, alcohol, asbestos, and processed meats. They definitely cause cancer. To be or not to be, that is the question on mobile phones. It’s not certain. As a smoking, drinking, pork pie lover, I’m not the best person to advise on the safety of 5G. Dr. Devokt’s latest research is available as open source from the Bristol University website. Maury Rumney has published a freely available article in the Cambridge Wireless Journal, and on the website 5G Space Appeal, you’ll find links to many other scientific studies as well as an invitation to join 189,000 490 signatories from 204 nations who are calling for a moratorium. Saturday, January 25th has been declared a global day of action against 5G. And I’ll be back on Wednesday, the 12th of February with the next edition of Password. This one was presented by Peter Warren, produced by Blue Buffery, and written by Jane Wyatt. My thanks to them and to you for listening.

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