There's a war going on ...
I think Fiber will win. And how to protect yourself from the radiation, if that worries you.
There are currently two approaches for mobile communications:
Hi-powered (multi-Watt) transmission of data from your mobile device to cell-towers (and now 5G transmitters/receivers) that may be located thousands of feet or miles away1; or
Low-powered (multi-mWatt [mW = 1/1000 W]) transmission of data from your mobile device to a WiFi station (connected to the internet by fiber2) a 100 feet or so away.
And I think that the low-power WiFi and fiber approach will win, and high-power 3G-4G-5G-6G ... approach will lose; but, in many respects, these two approaches are merging3, and the high-power XG approach will always have its uses and remain with us for a long time4.
The first approach (high-power 5G) has a fundamental limitation: there is only so much bandwidth available on the frequencies allotted for the 5G network. This problem is being solved by a proliferation of 5G Transmitters/Receivers, each connected to fiber, in the cities.
And those high-power signals probably aren’t good for your brain or the rest of your body. And, no, if your worry about this electromagnetic radiation from the high-powered signals from the cell phone towers, you can’t protect yourself by not having a 5G phone.5
You can protect yourself from the high-powered signals from your mobile device. Always keep your mobile in airplane mode (so it doesn’t send out high-powered signals to connect to a tower maybe a mile away), and use WiFi-Calling (where the signals only go a 100 feet or so). You might even find that using the WiFi-Calling system, which connects to fiber, you get better and higher-quality connections6.
And, if you’re in a situation where you need to call, and are not connected to a nearby WiFi, and thus need to go out of airplane-mode, use your mobile device in Speaker Mode and keep it far away from your body.
I’ve been playing with high-power rf signals since a kid, first with walkie-talkies, and later with 100 kV rf signals to accelerate particle beams. And I haven’t died, yet. But maybe someday I will. But it won’t be from the mRNA Injections! And, no, I don’t wear a tin-foil hat. But my home is covered with a metal roof!7
Musk’s Starlink system is the epitome of this approach — using very high-powered signals to reach a satellite 400 miles away, though the phased-array directional microwave antennas do reduce the radiation considerably compared to the omni-directional antennas of yesteryear). Perhaps, for very remote places, such a system has it’s uses, but I doubt that it will ever become ubiquitous.
They are now even burying fiber along the 3 mile gravel road that leads to my house.
While we still have the traditional cell phone towers that you use when travelling on the interstate or in rural areas, the cities are being sprinkled with 5G Transmitters/Receivers on just about every lamp post that connect to fiber to handle this bandwidth.
Hey, here in the U.S. we still use 120 V when almost the whole rest of the world uses 230 V! That’s a fun story I should tell sometime.
Unless you’re fortunate enough (some might say unfortunate enough) to live someplace as where I live — one of the few places left on Earth with no cell phone coverage. Of course, even that is NOT true. I’m pretty sure that the cell phone network spans the land-surface of most of the the globe — at least North America and Europe. I found this out about 20 years ago in a remote part of Alaska. While here at home my mobile device tells me that there is no service, it is lying. If I were to dial 911 (which I’ve done), I would be immediately connected to the local sheriff with crystal clear reception. There’s a global land-based cell phone network; we’re just not in that club!
I’ve noticed many call drops or loss of fidelity, with calls from people using the high-power cellular network, but I can talk just fine all day using my mobile in Wi-Fi-calling-mode with my 0.0002 GBS (Giga Byte per second) download speed, and 0.00003 GBS upload speed DSL-copper-wire-phoneline connection to the Interweb. I hear some people have 100 GBS fiber connections to the Twitter-Web! I wonder what they do with all that data! They must talk even a lot faster and more than I do!
My low-sloped roofs are not well-suited for shingles (slopes of 3/12 and above). Is metal better than shingles? If installed well on a high-sloped roof, shingles can last a LONG time! The shingles on my barn (12/12, or 45 degree slope) have been there for about 50 years and are doing just fine! The same is true for metal roofs: if installed well (mine by the Amish), they should last a very long time. Hey, if you can’t trust the Amish, whom can you trust?!
If I were to dial 911 (which I’ve done), I would be immediately connected to the local sheriff with crystal clear reception. There’s a global land-based cell phone network; we’re just not in that club!
Well theres a priority mode in the signalling protocol and it flags the packets as high priority, ups the power, will drain the battery and will boot others off the cell (why you lose your call more often in cities) if you dial the emergency number. There's a story of an engineer who hacked their phone to use high priority all the time to get a better signal.
In the UK, we have tile roofs which are hundreds of years old. If you keep the water out, these things last forever.
5g...I avoid using the microwave at all (only for sterilising things) and when I do, I stand well back. I try and keep the phone out of my pockets and in a bag instead