Kind: captions
Language: en
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could 5g signals affect airplanes
the new technology is expected to bring
transformatively faster data speeds 100
times faster than 4g
but the new technology is drawing
concern from the aviation industry
prompting policymakers to twice delay
the rollout and even leading to flight
cancellations
so what is 5g and what does it have to
do with airplanes
5g is the next generation of cellular
technology to follow 4g each generation
typically represents a leap forward in
the wireless connections that we can
achieve to our cell phones to our
tablets to our laptops and that usually
means a transformation in
what wireless does to our everyday lives
so radios tvs wi-fi all send data using
radio waves and 5g comes in three
flavors
low band which provides lots of coverage
at similar data download speeds to 4g
mid band which is kind of the best of
both worlds for coverage and speed and
high band or millimeter wave the fastest
but loses signal strength over
relatively short distances and is easily
blocked by buildings humans
even leaves
while the higher data rates at higher
frequencies are excellent almost
everything else about high frequencies
are a challenge
because 5g waves don't travel as far
they need more base stations or hubs to
support them and that's one of the
challenges and part of the reason that
for now 5g signals exist mostly in urban
areas the signal decays very fast and so
if you moved out of the range of base
station that better be another base
station that you can connect to so you
don't lose your connection
but maybe the most contentious issue
around the rollout has to do with safety
equipment airplanes use called the radio
altimeter
a device used to measure distances
so these uh altimeters are very useful
for aircraft as they come into land
or as they're taking off and in bad
weather
radio altimeters use radio waves to
measure the distance the plane is from
the ground they basically send a signal
which reflects back up from the ground
and goes back to the receiver they get a
very accurate estimate of height above
ground
that information feeds a lot of
automated systems planes use especially
for landing and in bad weather and
experts are concerned that interference
even for a few seconds could cause
problems it could be pretty serious
and that and that's why everybody is
very concerned about this the
radioaltimeter does a lot of different
things out of an abundance of caution we
have to
presume it's going to happen even though
it might be a very low probability you
know one accident is one too many is
really the way it comes out and people's
lives could be at stake
think of a radio receiver in a car
it's designed to tune into just one
station at a time
if it allows other stations to bleed
through it gets hard to hear anything
clearly
in the case of radio altimeters
interference could cause an altimeter
not to function at all or cause it to
give inaccurate readings
the standards for the altimeters were
really set by 1980 we hadn't really
haven't changed them much in the last 40
years
there isn't an easy solution for the
hardware on the airplanes
it has to be sort of redone
to have these filters in place and
that's that's what we're worried about
taking what could take two three or four
years
so that is where the concern is that
there are a lot of radar altimeters that
are old that do not have the latest
technology in terms of filtering and
they could potentially face interference
there's a potential of interference i
don't think anybody has demonstrated to
date that interference will occur
another thing at play is that the 5g
signal works in a fundamentally
different way from 4g that is it sends
signals out in beams targeted towards
individuals so
some of the analysis that i've seen on
this problem
has assumed that
all of the beam energy from 5g base
station will go in the direction of the
aircraft and it could be a potential
interferer the truth is that that is
very very very very very unlikely that
that will happen because the power will
be distributed among all the users it's
servicing most of whom
are on the ground
so to protect against interference
telecom companies have agreed to delay
turning on 5g towers near some airports
and now the faa estimates that about 90
of commercial airplanes have altimeters
that are approved for landing in
airports where 5g is deployed
that's a good sign but the fact that
they have not released the last 10
percent is very troubling because it
would suggest
some airplanes are going to be
you know have a problem
we need more data to know exactly how
the 5g signal might interact with
radioaltimeters in the us
there is a severe
lack of actual measurements so in some
sense in order to be able to really
address this you have to be able to
start deploying in a measured way so
that you can start taking measurements
as to what is the potential scale for
interference so there is a process that
needs to happen to really understand
what the potential of interference is
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