Right. It just seems to me like a solution looking for a problem, but I accept that I probably aren’t subjected to the same bandwidth limitations that those living in larger cities might be.
We’re really getting off the main track here, but those two areas are really irrelevant for airports.
Not at all. The airlines want the restrictions in the approach path for the airport. That’s often a dense urban environment. I live in San Jose and the approach path for SJC is literally the densest part of the city.
Ah, thanks. I thought it was mostly just around the airport itself. La Guardia is pretty dense outside the airport boundaries, too.
Just an additional piece of information to follow up on @Dr.Strangelove’s post. 5g is NOT a specific standard or bandwidth in the US. I cannot stress this enough. 5G is largely a marketing term here, where in Europe, for example, 4G and other definitions actually have to adhere to certain legal standards.
That’s why when you hear about the current 5G / FAA kerfluffle, it’s all about the airlines, ATT and Verizon, not T-Mobile. That’s because T-Mobile went big in the more intermediate frequencies. Basically 4G on steroids, with better speeds, but not the blistering fast options promised by the prior two carriers. And these frequencies aren’t proximate to the ones used by the FAA so they flew . . . under the radar (sorry, couldn’t resist).
Just wanted to get that out there, as it’s specific frequencies used by specific carriers that are the issue, which is being labeled as 5G.
Which is Not a (unified) thing.
Just saying.
Thanks for checking in on that. I’d meant to look up that information, since I knew the different carriers used different bands but didn’t know off-hand which ones used which.
The specific band at stake here is the 3.7-3.98 GHz range. The carriers use several other bands, both above and below this range, but those aren’t the issue.
The carriers are already in the process of phasing out their 3G networks, and will repurpose the frequencies for 5G. That’s ok (unless you have a 3G-only device), since the frequencies are already in use any possible interference effects were already in play. At some point in the future, they’ll phase out the 4G bands as well.
Speaking of “marketing terms,” there’s a telecommunications company advertising around here using the term “10G” as some kind of advance in technology their workers are getting ready to put in place.
When you know the “G” in 3G/4G/5G is supposed to stand for “generation” (3rd generation, moving on to 4th generation, etc) this term of “10G” becomes laughable on its face. What are you gonna do, Mediacom, just skip over four generations of technological advances and time travel into the future? But as a marketing term supposedly telling us customers they’re so far ahead of everyone else, yeah, that’s what that is.
@Richard_Pearse Your cites about which approaches are affected and what aircraft have been cleared is pretty interesting. Those categories of approaches are, well, almost all of them … but then the article about the aircraft indicates the majority of domestic aircraft, anyway, should not be affected. For some reason it’s some of the larger planes like the 777 and 787 that they seem to be worried about.
The issue at hand here is manyfold:
- spectrum is expensive. It’s a supply and demand thing, they’re not making any more, it’s chock full, and they’re not making any more, unless
- the change HOW its used. More efficient protocols are developed as we get better at these things, and we learn how to do more with less, but
- You can’t GET those improvements in the hands of the end users unless you swap out the entire population of radios (cellphones) that are already in circulation because some of the improvements are hardware, not just software (You’re not going to have a 15 year cellphone, even if the battery lasted that long, also
- MARKETING! The Cellphone carriers want you to pay up every 2 years as that’s one of the revenue streams, and they do that by rolling out new capabilities that both make the experience faster for a person, but also cram more people in the same space.
- PHYSICS - You can’t fool physics. IF you have a given amount of frequency, you can cram more people in it by getting them to talk quieter and gaving more cell towers for them to do their talking to. One of the party tricks is sub-millimeter band which is FAST, but also doesn’t penetrate WALLS…so it’s being rolled out in places like Stadiums where the people are packed and the data rates need to be high.
- Physics II - Your phone is flat PACKED with radios…Bluetooth, Wifi (2.4 and 5ghz), NFC, UWM in Apples make their air tags tell you they’re 4 feet from you and to the left, 3g, 4g, 5g…and that 5G is chopped up by country and cellphone provider because you’re chopping up a limited resource that has to lay down on a spectrum that had stuff in it before the people that be wanted to roll out 5g and it’s speed and population improvements. One spec of iphone 13 can pick and choose from 56 available bands, depending on what the local cell tower supports…which does so based on local conditions (Geography, population density, etc.)
It IS a standard, but it’s one that’s so far ranging, has so many nooks and crannies, and has so many physical, licensing, and political constraints that it’s whole lot easier to say ‘You have a t-mobile phone with 5g*’…and then bury the * way back on page 57 of the pdf nobody ever reads.
The cellphone providers want to provide you with 20% better experience, while cramming more of you in the same space…there are photos of phones getting Gigabit speeds with 5g, but they’re in conditions you’ll never experience (35 but not more than 37 feet away from a sub-millimeter cell tower…that nobody else is on…with a huge pipe…to a server that nobody else is using…)
Which is why I asked the question, there could be a safety issue, a political issue, a technical issue, or some combination…and it sounds like there’s an edge case were it could be a physical issue.
Folks saying ‘meh, it only effects a handful of planes in a handful of situations’ are disingenuously ignoring the steaming crap sandwich that comes from killing a couple of hundred people in a plane crash in a snow storm.
Which also ignores the media that LOVES a good conflict that can be summed up with “Airlines! Cellphone Carriers! 5G! DEATH!!!”
Apologies if this has already been discussed. Here is an announcement on the roll out of 5G near airports:
I see that it is SA CAT I ILS which I think stands for “Special Authorisation” so it’s not just the standard CAT I ILS.
There are plenty of better ideas out there, even within the radar portion of the EM spectrum.
For example, radar altimeters could get much better at picking out their own signals if they encoded their pulses with a rolling key. Laser designators (for telling laser-guided weapons what to hit) encode their pulses this way to prevent enemies from spoofing the signal. This way, you’d not only know whether all the radar altimeters on a given plane agreed, but you’d know which altimeter disagreed with the others.
(You could use time-division multiplexing to pick out individual sensors on a single plane, and I’d be shocked if that’s not how most multi-sensor radar altimeters worked. But encoding the pulses would also make it much easier to avoid picking up the signal from planes on the ground or on parallel approaches).
I know you made the point that commercial aviation isn’t the military, but another set of cutting-edge manufacturers makes full use of the exact same technology: garage-door-remote manufacturers. Remote locks for cars use this too.
It’s not that the avionics folks need to adopt obscure and sophisticated military SIGINT countermeasures—it’s that they need to catch up to basic RF/EMI best practices. You know, like the garage-door-opener manufacturers.
For context, I’m among the aerospace engineers on the board. My area of expertise is in structures, not RF engineering, so I don’t want to overstate my case. But the consensus among my aerospace engineering cohort is that the FAA is somewhat butt-hurt over the ugliness that came out of the 737MAX debacle and is perhaps protesting too much that they care about SAFETY!!!1.
Back in the aughts, I was working for a Boeing subcontractor on the 787 pilot controls. I found a design flaw in an important component that happened to be shared with the 777. I watched my report make its way through the FAA bureaucracy, and the response was ultimately “it’s never broken in the 777, and that plane has had never had a problem with this part, so by inspection, it’s fine.” (I fully agree with that assessment, BTW).
But the process was long and painful for those involved. (I wasn’t involved aside from my initial report). But I mention this to illustrate that the certification process for aerospace parts takes a lot of time and money, and that goes triple for RF components.
In other words, the reason the aviation industry tolerates outdated radar altimeter filtering is the same reason seatback entertainment systems are decades out of date compared to the phone in your pocket: electronics for aircraft are very expensive to design and qualify as safe. The industry and its regulators generally avoid forced redesigns at all costs.
But in this case, the FAA was recently embarrassed (by the 737MAX scandal) and there’s always hay to be made as part of an interagency turf war. Of course, this is all compounded by the sanctimony inherent in any dispute when one side can claim to be “on the side of safety,” as the FAA can. (Analogy: “won’t somebody think of the children?!?”)
The FAA has many legitimate reasons to be cautious, but the one known as “CYA” is not among them. Extraordinarily safe air travel is one of the marvels of modern society, at least from where I sit. But that doesn’t mean the safety culture of the commercial aviation industry is free of pathologies, quirks and human bias.
Edits: clarity
It’s dumb, and they’re obviously trying to capitalize on “5G” branding, but according to them, 10G is referring to a network capable of 10 gigabits/sec transfer rates. What makes it lame is them exploiting the ambiguity between “generation” and “gigabit”, not that 10G is inherently meaningless in this context.
This is awesome…there’s folks that don’t know, folks that can suppose, and folks close enough that can see the sausage being made.
It’s also entirely possible they don’t want to pay to get current tech validated and by the time they do…2030 or so…then Everybody else will have run off to the next hot new thing and the airline industry will be behind again.
Dollars to donuts, the medical industry is in the same boat.
Thanks for that. I would’ve thought they were already using encoded pulses. Maybe thats why some models on some aircraft are ok.
Maybe it won’t be such a big deal after all:
All of the hoopla news mention Verizon & AT&T, but not T-Mobile. I have had 5g T-Mobile phone for four months and I do occasionally have 5G reception. Why isn’t T-Mobile (or any other carrier) mentioned in these complaints?
From above: