Europe Is Testing 12.5 Gbps Wireless

Lorien_the_first_one brings word that in Europe, a breakthrough for post-4G communications has been announced. A public-private consortium known as IPHOBAC has been developing new communications technology that is near commercialization now. Quoting: "With much of the mobile world yet to migrate to 3G mobile communications, let alone 4G, European researchers are already working on a new technology able to deliver data wirelessly up to 12.5Gb/s. The technology — known as 'millimeter-wave' or microwave photonics — has commercial applications not just in telecommunications (access and in-house networks) but also in instrumentation, radar, security, radio astronomy and other fields."

Comments

Re:Fry

[sakdoctor]

You're talking crap.

Whilst IR photons have a higher energy than microwaves, so do visible light photons.

On the other hand, opacity and absorbtion of various human tissues, is a complex relationship with wavelength.

Resonance

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not just energy, but resonance as well. High energy photons destroy your DNA and cells by brute force. Lower frequency photons do it by resonating with your DNA and cells and shaking them to bits. It's the reason why a microwave oven is tuned to 2.4GHz, as that is the frequency at which water molecules, including those in your body, resonate.

Re:Resonance

[Sockatume]

Actually, resonant processes are the ones that depend absolutely upon the photon energy, and the energy of a microwave photon is too low to do anything interesting. Microwaves can do work by a nonresonant, thermal process, but that's it.

A resonant process is one in which the photon has the right energy to trigger a particular transition. Ionising radiation (UV, x-rays, etc.) works by a resonant process, and depends on the quantum of radiation having enough energy to eject an electron from the molecule. As you go down in energy from there, you have enough energy per photon to resonantly electronically excite molecules (visual light, used in the eyes to detect light) or vibrationally excite (IR), or down at the bottom, to rotationally (microwave), and then translationally excite molecules.

Correspondingly, it gets harder and harder to cause any chemistry with those photons. It's trivial to break up a molecule by shifting its electrons around or ejecting them altogether, or to a lesser extent it's possible to chop something up by exciting a particular molecular stretching vibration such that the bond(s) dissociate(s). However it's a serious challenge to cleave a bond with a rotational excitation alone.

So, how could a microwave do any chemistry, and thus damage, to your tissues? It's a simple thermal process. When you rotationally excite a molecule, in the gas phase, the molecule, or part of it, changes its rotational motion in some way. There are couplings between rotational and vibrational motions, and upwards to electronic excitations. In the solution or solid phase, there are also couplings to the translational motion of the molecules, meaning that ultimately the energy from the microwave can end up speeding up the molecule's motion, which is plain old heating.

So the energy you dump in with the microwaves becomes "thermalised", spreading over the whole range of states evenly, with a pretty huge chunk of it going into heating up the material. That heat lets you do old-fashioned collision-activated chemistry. What the anti-EM movement don't want you to think about is that this thermal process is entirely dependent on your exposure. It's like standing next to a furnace. A foot away, you're toast. Six feet away, you're warm. One hundred feet away, you don't know it exists.

In summary, it is not possible for radio to cause you thermal damage because the exposure is simply too low. No non-thermal, resonant process for damage has been shown to exist, and trivial physical chemistry makes it clear that one probably never will be found.

Re:Resonance

[Muad'Dave]

Google around for papers by Dr. Eleanor Adair. She was an expert on RF exposure, and has done thousands of Simian and Human exposure tests as described in this NY Times Article. She claims to have personally tried every test before using it on her subjects, with no ill effects, ever. I tend to believe it, since the frequencies involved are 10^6 times lower than ionizing radiation that is proven dangerous.

wrong link in article

[Anonymous Coward]

the correct link is http://www.ist-iphobac.org/, not http://www.iphobac-survey.org/

Association with 3G misleading

[Anonymous Coward]

The comparison with 3G/4G systems is misleading, as these terms denote wide-area cellular telephone networks. Our cellular links are mobile, work over long ranges, and do not require a line-of-sight path from transmitter to receiver. 60 GHz wireless links, by comparison, typically require highly directive antennas, ie. the transmitter radiates energy directly at the receiver in a narrow beam. This makes it more suitable for fixed point link, rather than mobile, at this stage of development. Also, 60 GHz wireless signals are highly attenuated as they pass through solid objects, hence the need for a line-of-sight path. So, while its true mm-wave communications offers unparalleled wireless data rates, the comparison with cellular networks is not necessarily a good one.

Re:Sorry you didn't get the point

[Ginger Unicorn]

The point he was making is that you said specifically that the headline was US bashing, but all the headline says is the some research is being conducted in Europe. You'd have to work very hard at being insecure and over-sensitive to read that as some kind of slight against America. From a purely pedantic standpoint, it's the article/summary that you should have denounced, the headline was entirely innocuous.

Re:Take the stairs? Take the elevator?

[Anonymous Coward]

900Gb on a mobile device? Are you fucking retarded? If you aren't gonna read TFA, at least read TFS of this one and the article in your link, ffs.

Re:Fry

[jschen]

Your implicit assumption that higher energy photons are universally more dangerous than lower energy photons would seem to speak for the latter.

This has been experimentally verified in experiments on the photoelectric effect. Indeed, Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1921 "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect" (emphasis mine; notice that Einstein did not win the prize "because of relativity", as many would assume). Below a certain energy level per photon, nothing happens no matter how intense the light. Above the threshold, something happens (with the rate dependent on the intensity of the light).

Of course, thermal warming can also happen. In recent years, microwave-assisted organic synthesis was a big fad. But the most careful studies have demonstrated that the so-called "microwave effect" is simple thermal heating in all known cases, and despite theoretical explanations for why a non-thermal microwave effect might exist (going so far as to predict the types of reactions for which the largest effect might be found) and papers claiming the discovery of such effects, effects seen to date are purely thermal. See this J Org Chem paper. Any effect we see from a cell phone in the pocket would appear to be the same effect as simply warming our thigh a miniscule bit.