France hopes to allay 5G fear with emissions tests

France’s digital secretary has expanded his government’s mobile emissions testing programme, amid lingering hysteria over 5G signals.

Cédric O announced this week that the government’s spectrum watchdog, ANFR, will this year conduct 6,500 mobile emissions tests covering all generations of mobile technology currently in commercial use. This will be ramped up to 10,000 in 2021. By comparison, in 2019 the regulator carried out a total of 3,066 checks.

“In the specific context of the launch of 5G, ANFR will carry out 4,800 specific measurements in order to measure the transmission power of the antennas before and after the deployment of 5G in various representative configurations. Thus, 300 measurements will be carried out before the end of the year 2020 and 4,500 during the year 2021,” he said, in a statement.

“These measurements will provide objective information on exposure related to the deployment of 5G, whether in the 3.5 GHz frequency band being allocated by ARCEP or through the use of existing bands,” he said.

The test results will be made public on ANFR’s Website.

O noted that in France, average exposure to cellular radiation is almost 150 times lower than the internationally-recognised recommended maximum threshold. The subtext being that mobile technology does not pose an imminent risk to your continued existence – nor will it infect you with coronavirus – so please could you stop vandalising 5G sites.

While producing empirical evidence of 5G emissions in a bid to ease the public’s misgivings is a noble idea, sadly, it probably won’t sway any committed conspiracy theorists. In all likelihood, they will claim that the test results are at best unreliable or at worst, completely made up. Anything to avoid confronting the reality that the mobile industry doesn’t actually want to kill off all of its paying customers.