[bumby]

This implies lower effective dose per antenna, correct? Meaning it's conceivable to have a higher effective dose per person if there is a high enough increase in antenna exposure (wherever that antenna count threshold is)?

I'm not saying that means it's dangerous, just trying to clarify.

[Arnt]

No, lower total dose, assuming other things stay the same, which they don't. Notably, your total traffic increases as your capacity does, and 5G has much higher total capacity than EDGE did.

If you assume that people use their 5G phones to transmit a terabyte per month because the speed is so convenient, while they used their EDGE phones for a kilobyte per month, that'a a higher total load, so you can reasonably say that 5G involves higher radiation. Or you can compare for the same transmission, and find that it's lower.

You may also assume that the damage done isn't linear with the transmission power or operating frequency, which complicates matters even more. But generally, 5G uses less power to do the same work than 4G, which in turn uses less… because in each new generation, there's a little better error correction and 64QAM is replaced by 128QAM or so, and so they reduce transmission power a little until the reduced power is again just enough for the better error correction and denser codec.

IMO, a lot of this comes down to "doing things is more dangerous than not", which is nearly always true. Sports may keep you fit but your risk of breaking a leg is higher than if you were sitting in front of a TV. Transmitting data is riskier than not. But also more useful, because not watching youtube in HD is clearly useless, while watching them is worth some risk.

[leereeves]

It seems to be a rule that data expands to fill the available bandwidth.

With that in mind, what's the relative transmission power for 4G vs 5G if both are using all their respective maximum bandwidth?

[Arnt]

5G the tiniest bit lower, because the error correction is a tiny bit better, so the receiver can tell the transmitter to adjust the volume a little bit, assuming the same distance/path.

Or the same if you want to compare early 5G with late 4G, because this is really the same thing. They deploy improvements all the time, and after some number of improvements they rename.