America's FAA Reveals 50 Airports Getting '5G Buffer' Zones for Six Months (pcmag.com) 57
America's Federal Aviation Administration "has published the list of 50 airports around which it wants Verizon and AT&T to create '5G buffer' zones..." reports PC Magazine:
The Department of Transportation previously asked Verizon and AT&T to delay the deployment of their C-Band networks from Dec. 5, 2021 to Jan. 5 due to concerns about interference affecting the altimeters used by commercial aircraft. Then on Jan. 2 the FAA asked the carriers to push back the debut of their C-Band networks again so it could investigate those safety risks.
The FAA said at the time that it would "identify priority airports where a buffer zone would permit aviation operations to continue safely while the FAA completes its assessments of the interference potential around those airports." Verizon and AT&T agreed to delay the launch of their C-Band networks for two weeks and respect the buffer zones designated by the FAA.
The administration says in its announcement that "the wireless companies agreed to turn off transmitters and make other adjustments near these airports for six months to minimize potential 5G interference with sensitive aircraft instruments used in low-visibility landings...." Reuters reports that the FAA's list was informed by Verizon and AT&T's coverage maps — in some cases "5G towers are far enough away that a natural buffer exists," the FAA says, according to the report — as well as a given airport's existing capabilities.
"Traffic volume, the number of low-visibility days and geographic location factored into the selection," acknowledges the FAA's statement.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader xetdog for sharing the story!
The FAA said at the time that it would "identify priority airports where a buffer zone would permit aviation operations to continue safely while the FAA completes its assessments of the interference potential around those airports." Verizon and AT&T agreed to delay the launch of their C-Band networks for two weeks and respect the buffer zones designated by the FAA.
The administration says in its announcement that "the wireless companies agreed to turn off transmitters and make other adjustments near these airports for six months to minimize potential 5G interference with sensitive aircraft instruments used in low-visibility landings...." Reuters reports that the FAA's list was informed by Verizon and AT&T's coverage maps — in some cases "5G towers are far enough away that a natural buffer exists," the FAA says, according to the report — as well as a given airport's existing capabilities.
"Traffic volume, the number of low-visibility days and geographic location factored into the selection," acknowledges the FAA's statement.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader xetdog for sharing the story!
Well done (Score:2)
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I think we can live with slightly slower facebook scrolling times and various streaming shit for 6 months to avoid a possible plane crash...
Sounds great - won't work. Every passenger who has been vaccinated is carrying a 5G chip. 8^/
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Sounds great - won't work. Every passenger who has been vaccinated is carrying a 5G chip.
Clearly we will need to ban passengers that are vaccinated
God has told me that the vaccine is the mark of the beast - they have earned their award already.
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I don't think the voice in your head that told you that is who you think it is. What about the other 7+ vaccinations you have received in your lifetime? Did your inner voice warn you against them too? Or is this inner voice repeating all the BS you read on Twitter, FB, and Gettr?
If getting the vaccine is truly the mark of the beast, then he-who-must-not-be-named must be hiding his from his followers.
Umm - Whoosh?
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Sure, but on the airplane it is in flight mode
Re: Well done (Score:2)
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Except Boeing who purposefully built defective planes now blames 5G for all its woes. And donâ(TM)t forget all the conservative areas of the YS that now hate technology and the free market.
And how long has your husband worked for Verizon, ma'am?
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You tithe? What an awful waste of cash. You do know what all those priests have been doing with your tithe, don't you?
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for 6 months to avoid a possible plane crash...
The question is what exactly happens after these 6 months that hasn't already happened since the frequency repack plans were announced many many many years ago? AND/OR why did airplane manufacturers wait until the deadline to address it if it's fixable in 6 months?
IMHO, the solution is to indeed offer a small grace period then simply decertify the airworthiness of planes with faulty altimeters after that window. Blocking license holders from using the spectrum the government sold them indefinitely is no s
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It’s a little more complicated than that, and hopefully the additional real-world “testing” will help to better quantify the scale and scope of issues. I would expect altimeters that are too vulnerable to interference will be forced to upgrade, but doing it too blindly is a lot of unnecessary expense.
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real-world “testing”
No thanks... if there's any doubt whether your altimeters on commercial passenger-rated planes ACTUALLY meet interference spec and will continue to work properly you have to go back to an anechoic chamber and actually design + test + recertify it like you did every OTHER rf-sensitive piece on the plane. You don't get to yolo 737-max8 debug this shit in real-time over our heads.
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Except it's all just goofy as hell. There's no solid proof that 5G is going to cause a problem.
You know how you can tell? Because if it were ACTUALLY going to cause a problem, they'd "protect" more than just 50 airports. They'd also do it for more than just 6 months. You don't just say, "Hey, let's run an experiment with a bunch of small and medium airports around the country and see if it kills people." The radio waves aren't going to change by July. Physics will be the same.
It's not like this isn't testab
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More to the point, though, a number of the largest airports in the country by passenger volume *aren't* on the list. Including the most-traffic airport in the US, Atlanta. Other notable exclusions include Denver, Salt Lake City, Boston, Baltimore, Tampa, and San Diego.
Re: Well done (Score:2)
And then, on the other hand... Flint,MI is on the list?
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Wait, when did they announce that? Am I going to die?!
Signed,
Banana Joe.
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The issue is that radio altimeters are licensed for a 200Mhz band, but most of them actually listen to a 1.2Ghz band because they have a crap receive mask on them. Theres a 200Mhz guard band between the radio altimeter band and the upper 5G band, but the problem is that radio altimeters listen way past that and on into the 5G band anyway. The power of the 5G transmission does matter here, as the fidelity of the altimeter drops off the further into the 5G band it gets, so the higher power the 5G transmissi
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We have 5G being rolled out here in NZ, and a couple of observations I have:
1. several of the early rollout spots are near airports, with no issues
2. NZ doesn't use the upper 5G band that the US does, so thats why there are no issues
3. I got 5G for free with my $16 a month pay-as-you-go package - and its full speed as well
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The issue is that radio altimeters are licensed for a 200Mhz band, but most of them actually listen to a 1.2Ghz band because they have a crap receive mask on them.
I thought it was 4.2-4.4GHz?
“As an initial matter, the [FCC] concluded in the C-Band Order that the 3.7 GHz Service technical rules and the spectral separation of at least 220 megahertz from radio altimeter operations “are sufficient to protect aeronautical services in the 4.2-4.4 GHz band.”
https://skybrary.aero/articles... [skybrary.aero]
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Except it's all just goofy as hell. There's no solid proof that 5G is going to cause a problem.[...]It's not like this isn't testable[...]I haven't read yet where this voodoo BS came from, but that's all it is. It's pseudoscientific crud.
It came from studies and tests done a couple years ago, which the FCC decided to ignore when they auctioned off the spectrum in October.
5G C-Band Interference with Radar Altimeters in Aviation [youtube.com]
Except it's all just goofy as hell. There's no solid proof that 5G is going to cause a problem.[...]It's not like this isn't testable[...]I haven't read yet where this voodoo BS came from, but that's all it is. It's pseudoscientific crud.
It came from studies and tests done a couple years ago, which the FCC decided to ignore when they auctioned off the spectrum in October.
5G C-Band Interference with Radar Altimeters in Aviation [youtube.com]
RTCA Technical Webinar: Interference Risk on Radar Altimeters from Planned 5G [youtube.com]
RTCA, Inc. reports Potential 5G Interference to Ra [youtube.com]
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The problem is a fairly special case. It would be surprising if it affected more than those 50 airports.
So 5G is now in airplane mode? (Score:2)
Re: So 5G is now in airplane mode? (Score:2)
Things that can cause a plane to crash are supposed to happen less than 1 in a billion times, according to standard FAA safety guidance. (Only once in ten million times if there are only a few deaths on the plane!) You can't test enough to figure out if you've met that threshold.
5G was supposed to fix buffering (Score:2)
Re: 5G was supposed to fix buffering (Score:4, Funny)
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Do you know who likes that spinning ball? The cat in that video.
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Not Dulles or Reagan National? (Score:2)
Seems a little weird that the airports serving Our Nation's Capital (tm) aren't on the list.
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Even if we did dozens of studies, do you think we'd see any difference on the brains of the average idiots walking down the street? They have Facebook accounts, for crying out loud!
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Kind of funny. I have a Facebook account, it's the easiest way to stay in touch with some friends and family. But there's no way I'm installing it on my phone. At least the desktop browser tries to sandbox things (lately). Phones are the exact opposite.
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Isn't it reasonable, even if we continue rolling out 5G, to have new studies to see if the new phone parameters (ie 5G signals) are the same (no effect on people's brains etc.) or different?
We already know that 5G affects the brains of politicians and government officials. That's what this whole thing is about!
how this happened (Score:4, Informative)
The airplane equipment was and is in compliance with the standards. In 2020 the government commissioned a technical study of the issue, which identified the potential inrerference problem. The FCC did not like the answer, so in October 2021 they decided to ignore it and auctioned off the spectrum abyway, getting bazillions of dollars. Two months later (now a month ago) the telcos were scheduled to roll out.
This affects many more airports than the 50 critical ones the FAA has identified. And it's not just passenger airlines, it's also cargo (and the mail/UPS/FEDEX/Amazon). And it's also the little guys: smaller operators, air taxi services, and also private aviation (which is a lot).
It also impacts every helicopter ambulance picking up at car crashes and stuff, and landing at the hospital.
The mitigations used in other countries such as France, Canada, Austrailia, is obviously not comprehensive. But that's what this 6 month deal is. (In the other countries the measures are permanent, part of their government's 5G infrastructure plan all along. Note that we have hundreds of times the number of airports as those countries. Out of more than 5,000 airports, we're going to protect 50 of them. And only for six months.)
Fixing the problem by replacing the radios in all our airplanes is probably the best solution. However, that would cost (I'm going to guess) about a half-billion or more dollars. It would take at least a year or two, assuming a "warp speed" thing where all the normal FAA regulations go out the window. The FAA is the slowest bureaucracy in the US government. And who is to pay for all that new equipment on the airplanes? The owners, who acted in good faith and had the rug pulled out from under them? The government? The telcos? Ready for all your ticket prices to quadruple, or what?
Here is a good technical-but-not-too video explaining the issue and recounting the 2020 study:
5G C-Band Interference with Radar Altimeters in Aviation [youtube.com]
And here are some more:
RTCA, Inc. reports Potential 5G Interference to Radio Altimeters [youtube.com]
RTCA Technical Webinar: Interference Risk on Radar Altimeters from Planned 5G [youtube.com]
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The airplane equipment was and is in compliance with the standards.
Yeah, NO!
As unlicensed emitters, they are forbidden to interfere with licensed emitters, and must accept any out-of band signals produced by 'intentional' ( licensed ) emitters.
They used to be able to get away with lousy receivers with cruddy filters, back in the bad old days when there were not emitters using the adjacent frequency bands, so their illegitimate over-sensitivity was not a problem ( for them... ).
Now that the FCC has licensed common carriers using ( numerically ) closer frequency bands, their
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It's not going to affect much private aviation. In order to use a cat II/III ILS approach you have to be specially certified and have a very expensive radar altimeter. Some Gulfstreams might occasionally have to pick an alternate where the clouds are more than 150' off the ground, but Bob in his Cessna isn't going to notice.
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It's not going to affect much private aviation. In order to use a cat II/III ILS approach you have to be specially certified and have a very expensive radar altimeter. Some Gulfstreams might occasionally have to pick an alternate where the clouds are more than 150' off the ground, but Bob in his Cessna isn't going to notice.
Many four-place airplanes have radar altimiters, and use them for additional safety during all approach procedures.
Likewise, helicopters use them.
And there are not "a few" business jets using them. There are thousands of such jets.
Also, CAT II authorization and training is not as hard or as rare as you imagine.
It is true that airliners have fancy multi-redundant radar altimiters for entirely automated (CAT III) landings. That is critical for our aviation infrastructure, but it is not the main use of radar a
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The first video link mentions that the report has been out a couple of years now.
So why wait till the last minute before bringing up concerns? Or is this something to do with the previous administration not bothering and the current one is kind of stuck?
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The first video link mentions that the report has been out a couple of years now.
So why wait till the last minute before bringing up concerns? Or is this something to do with the previous administration not bothering and the current one is kind of stuck?
While you desperately want to blame this mess on the "previous administration" (as you dogwhistle it), it's not Trump. It's Biden. His administration has been in complete control of this from the beginning. Actually, getting 5G deployed as quickly as possible was one of Biden's campaign platforms, a major focus of his first 100 days, the main topic of his first international relations summit with Japan, and a cornerstone of his infrastructure bill. One of the first things Biden did when he came into office
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> "previous administration" (as you dogwhistle it),
How is this a dog whistle? Do Republicans not know that Trump was the previous administration?
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> The airplane equipment was and is in compliance
> with the standards.
There is a 220MHz separation between the highest frequency (3.98GHz) in the C-band licensed to the telcos and the lowest frequency (4.2GHz) licensed to the airlines. In the 5GHz range, the largest 5G channel bandwidth is 100Mhz, which would still leave 170Mhz separation if a phone or tower was tuned to 3.98GHz and was "leaking" outside its licensed spectrum. If the airlines are operating their equipment 220MHz... or even 170MHz...
Didn't the FAA promise not to do this? (Score:2)
I had thought that the cell carriers only agreed to grant the FAA another two week extension was because the FAA promised not to ask for another extension (as in, two more weeks and then they were done with this). Now the FAA is asking for a six month extension in 50 different places...
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No, the FAA agreed not to further hold the 5G rollout hostage by threatening grounding planes. The 5G rollout is commencing now as planned, just with an exclusion zone around airports.
Same thing the French did.
SeaTac (Score:2)
Great.
Now are they going to extend the buffer zone to include Coast Guard helicopter search and rescue? How about medical airlifts to Harborview hospital? Because it's more than commercial aircraft** on final approach that need instrument capabilities [wikipedia.org] in limited visibility conditions*.
*Yeah. Kobe didn't NEED to get somewhere. They could have just turned around and taken a cab. Are we going to divert the critically injured to ground transportation whenever it's a foggy day and YouTube starts buffering cat
Airlines need to replace obsolete electronics (Score:2)
As usual, management is overruling engineers, and refusing to comply with published airworthiness directives.
Continuing to use radar altimeters that infringe on spectrum that has been allocated for communications is a violation of 26 CRF part 15.
As unlicensed receivers, they must accept any and all 'interference' ( *THEIR* description ) sourced from LICENSED emitters.
Trying to browbeat the legitimate LICENSED users of the spectrum ( 5G carriers ) into avoiding use of the frequencies they PURCHASED, because
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That's 26 _C_F_R_ ( Code of Federal Regulations ) not CRF. My muscle memory inserted the stock ticker symbol of one of my investments that I have typed *way* too many times.
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OK, let's try this again:
"Title 47 Chapter 1 Subchapter A Part 15 Subpart C "
Caffeine! More caffeine! And an auto-correcting keyboard, pleeeze....
6 months to put in a room and turn on? (Score:1)
Does it really take them 6 months to put them both in the same room and turn them on?!?
Like, what the hell are ttey doing that takes 6 months to test?
And yet zero other countries find the need. (Score:1)