Oddbean

@:snufkinspringtune: :cirnofortnite: :watamelon_boo... @Springtime for Zeon (Woggy Mk II) putting cell sites and other fixed radio on top of buildings is entirely normal and has been for years. hell, so is putting them inside buildings. pick a multi tenant commercial building and look for a telecom closet on the top floor: odds are you'll see equipment from one of the big cell carriers. there absolutely are places where the radiation is a safety risk: directly in front of the antennas on the roof. anything remotely usable for high bandwidth communications is in the microwave band, and it all affects meatbags in about the same way, by being readily absorbed by water and converted to heat. if you're not standing directly in front of the antenna, you're receiving milliwatts at the absolute most. i dunno if android phones have apps that show signal in dBm, but that's an absolute measurement of power. they've gotta be on top of buildings or even on lamp posts for density. before the smartphone era you could slap some antennas on a tower hundreds of feet high and that was plenty of bandwidth for an entire town's worth of voice calls and text messages. but now you need *much* higher radio density; there's only so much useful space in the electromagnetic spectrum, less so in the bands licensed for use, and it's shared between all devices in the physical space where they can pick up each other's transmissions. so we've gotta make the broadcast domains smaller: put the cell sites closer to the ground, reduce transmit power levels, and carefully arrange cell sites and directional antennas to avoid overlapping channels within your licensed spectrum. you need more places where you convert stuff from a low bandwidth shared medium (the 4G/LTE/5G bands) to a high bandwidth dedicated medium (optical fiber). https://media.wolfgirl.bar/5d279fe0791578f73efb929dcb1aa86b8b9bc125cfe4dda0bac553609d4332cb.jpg