Boeing, Airbus Executives Urge Delay in US 5G Wireless Deployment (reuters.com) 82
Boeing Chief Executive Dave Calhoun and Airbus Americas CEO Jeffrey Knittel have urged the Biden administration to delay planned deployment of new 5G wireless services, saying it could harm aviation safety. From a report: The executives in a joint letter seen by Reuters asked U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg to support postponing AT&T and Verizon's Jan. 5 deployment of C-Band spectrum 5G wireless. "5G interference could adversely affect the ability of aircraft to safely operate," the letter said, adding it could have "an enormous negative impact on the aviation industry." The industry and Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) have raised concerns about potential interference of 5G with sensitive aircraft electronics like radio altimeters.
Not 5G (Score:5, Informative)
C-band, man. WiFi uses some of that too and it hasnâ(TM)t caused any aircraft problems. Still, I am sure this will delay, or mostly likely totally prevent, 5G deployment in the C-band because nobody at the FCC would dare risk approving something that could result in being blamed for a plane crash.
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C band includes a lot of spectrum, depending on whose definition you use: roughly 4 to 8 GHz. The particular concern is a small fraction of the whole that is being reallocated for 5G use, and so will be higher power at airplane receive antennas, and potentially used in many more places than the previous emitters. That means more power at more places that might affect the radar altimeters using (effectively) adjacent spectrum.
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Matter of fact it has. This is why certain WiFi bands may or may not work - the router has to check for an airport radar signal and if it receives something these bands will be blocked.
Ummmmm...... (Score:3, Insightful)
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Probably did, but telecom lobbyists out-bribed the warners.
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People did think of it before now, and you can read at least four or five stories about it that have been on Slashdot in the last two months.
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Yes, they did:
FCC: How much guard band do you need around your already-huge reservation? Okay for 200 MHz (which is huge)?
FAA: Yeah, okay.
FCC: We're going to use the band close to the guard band
FAA: Oh no we need more space! Otherwise the world will fall apart!!!
^^ This looks as ascii art??! Slashdot, are you drunk?
No, seriously!? Where the fsck is the ascii art?
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This has been in the works officially since 2017. Both aviation (ICAO) and the telecommunications industry have had considerable input into the decision making. The ITU recently decided that the use of the band in question is ok and will not interfere based on their studies and experience. ICAO is pissed so is trying to get the decision reversed by spreading FUD.
Who cares what the executives say (Score:4, Insightful)
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What I'm reading is that the radar altimeters are extremely fragile, poorly designed devices.
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You mean they were designed with certain environmental assumptions, and then those assumptions were violated?
It's not the fault of decades-old devices that they don't function in an environment for which they weren't designed, especially when that design environment is a regulated environment.
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It's not the fault of decades-old devices that they don't function in an environment for which they weren't designed, especially when that design environment is a regulated environment.
No, it's the fault of the engineers of the decades-old devices (and their managers, employers et al) that they weren't designed for the regulatory environment in which they have to exist. These devices are vulnerable to interference from adjacent frequency bands to the ones being used. That is frankly unacceptable, because you have to expect that adjacent bands are going to be allocated eventually.
Re:Who cares what the executives say (Score:4, Insightful)
So you advocate designing for future unknown environments? Only with a little facetiousness: How do you ever finish your projects?
Not every system deficiency is due to malicious corner-cutting; most of the time people are making a good-faith effort.
Think about it from aviation's standpoint: you have someone coming in (the telecoms) and wanting the indigenous users of the land (spectrum) to not complain because the newcomers' pollution is crossing borders (even though they aren't technically using the other tribes' land) and causing a mess. This is the kind of thing societies used to war over.
It doesn't help that the FAA has been voicing concern over this for literal years; the telecom lobbies apparently have more influence, saying "no no it will be fine, and if there's a problem it's not our fault!"
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The issue isn't unknown environments, and the issue isn't about the "newcomers pollution".
The issue is that a lot of older radar altimeters are out-of-spec and bleed below their designated band for both transmission and reception.
And now someone wants to use the band below the band designated for radar altimeters.
So, in other words, radar altimeters have been out-of-spec for decades and people are only just starting to care.
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It is not that they bleed out of band. The receivers were only designed with enough selectivity to reject existing interference from adjacent channels which was limited because of how the FCC had allocated those areas. Now that has changed and the FCC is allocating that area to high power terrestrial transmitters.
There are lots of FCC allocations which rely on adjacent radio quiet areas, and naturally these adjacent areas are in high demand later because their protected status lead to them also being radi
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If we extend that game out far enough, it's the fault of whatever deity or alien intelligence that created the universe (because we have to have someone to blame, after all, so it can't be random) for not making the physical laws of universe safer to play with.
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Everything is the Big Bang's fault:
https://youtu.be/A6gDe7lEjuM [youtu.be] (around 2:28)
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Or we could extend it to the FCC who made a deal, and is now altering the deal. Pray the FCC does not alter it further.
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The adjacent bands were previously allocated. Now the regulators want to reallocate them to different purposes. Instead of being a satellite downlink channel (one common use for the problematic part of the C band), it will be used for higher power, more densely populated, ground transmitters.
I am sure you can imagine how that kind of change violates the assumptions that equipment designers made decades ago.
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I actually can, but the counterpoint is that you have to expect frequency allocations to change purposes. Once allocated, they can be reallocated...
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That counterpoint is incredibly stupid, because "assume the adjacent bands can be reallocated" does not say anything about future power levels in either band.
But no surprise there -- you are just one of many people in this thread who are posting without apparently knowing a thing about either spectrum allocation practices or RF design.
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That counterpoint is incredibly stupid, because "assume the adjacent bands can be reallocated" does not say anything about future power levels in either band.
That's actually my point. You can't expect that stuff to stay the same specifically because if it's reallocated, it might be for a different use. It's against the rules already for it to produce interference in your allocation, but not in theirs.
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RF components are not magic. There is always some degree of leakage by a transmitter to adjacent channels or bands, and always some degree of susceptibility by a receiver from signals in adjacent channels or bands. Nobody can actually make a brick-wall filter for either transmit or receive -- that would require an infinitely long (and acausal) filter.
Designers must make some assumptions about what is next door. A big part of the spectrum allocation process is understanding any existing assumptions.
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We seem similar things going on right now when engineers make decisions about how much security to include in devices. We may be very sad the future with the legacy devices become a huge attack vector - including devices that seem secure today. We know how to build systems that are fully encrypted
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The assumptions did not change. The 200 MHz guard band has always been there and judged sufficient.
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My 5G vax allows me to use Bing anywhere for free! And I grew a nice tail, chicks dig it.
Ban (Score:2)
Didn't they used to ban cellphone use on commercial aircraft?
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That was an FCC, not an FAA, restriction and had nothing to do with the safety of the aircraft. That ban was because a plane full of cell phones rapidly moving from tower to tower messed up the cell phone system.
FAA vs FCC (Score:1)
This is a pissing match between the FCC and the FAA. Planes with these radar systems (used for landing) are happily in use with no adverse effects in many parts of the world with closer 5G bands than what is under discussion here.
From what I've seen there is plenty of guard channel between what 5G is planning on using in the US and what these systems require, so no interference is expected. The FAA just doesn't like that it hasn't been coddled on this process and is doing everything it can to throw up its h
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Planes with these radar systems (used for landing) are happily in use with no adverse effects in many parts of the world with closer 5G bands than what is under discussion here.
From what I've seen there is plenty of guard channel between what 5G is planning on using in the US and what these systems require, so no interference is expected. The FAA just doesn't like that it hasn't been coddled on this process and is doing everything it can to throw up its hands on the process, including apparently roping Boeing into it. Boeing is running short on friends, so it must toe the FAA line on this.
I don't have a horse in this race, and I'm not American so I don't fully understand the agency relationships involved. But I have a background in RF so I was curious enough to do a bit of checking. This statement from a paper published by the RTCA seems credible to me: "Radar altimeters are inherently wideband systems, and currently have no requirements for front-end rejection—may be more susceptible to blocking than other types of receivers". (The PDF that contains this quote is available at https:// [rtca.org]
Re:FAA vs FCC (Score:4, Interesting)
The biggest problem with all this is really that the altimeters were incredibly badly designed decades ago when this interference wasn't really an issue.
And I'm sure all the recent fuckups in aviation have helped to create a panicked environment where *anything* that could possibly, potentially, maybe cause any kind of minute, tiny risk of something "bad" happening... Will be shouted out through a megaphone.
Re:FAA vs FCC (Score:5, Insightful)
The biggest problem with all this is really that the altimeters were incredibly badly designed decades ago when this interference wasn't really an issue.
Yes, this. The whole point of having frequency allocations is that you work with frequencies within the allocated band. If a device is working with other frequencies, that's on the designer of the device. It was never a good idea, and now it's causing harm. Everyone working with allocated spectrum should be aware of the fact that adjacent spectrum can and will be allocated to other uses, and design devices accordingly. If that makes them more expensive, it's money well spent. Maybe you reasonably don't bother with throwaway consumer devices but you certainly have to be scrupulous when dealing with equipment upon which people's lives depend.
Re:FAA vs FCC (Score:4, Interesting)
The whole point of having frequency allocations is that you work with frequencies within the allocated band... Everyone working with allocated spectrum should be aware of the fact that adjacent spectrum can and will be allocated to other uses, and design devices accordingly.
I was wondering about that. Even in the cheap non-mission-critical stuff I designed I paid attention to front-end filtering and out-of-band rejection. And the folks who designed those radar systems pretty well had to be experienced pros. So other than cost or laziness, was there a reason for designing the front ends for wide-band response? Did they anticipate using more spectrum at some point? Were the phase shifts that might be introduced by front-end filtering detrimental to accuracy? If either was the case then the FCC should have been consulted at the time. Maybe this was one of those 'forgiveness vs permission' things that backfired?
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It's a tradeoff. Ranging error scales basically with the inverse of the total signal energy: If you want better accuracy, you need to use higher power, higher bandwidth, or longer time. Safety engineers (between the equipment designers and aviation regulators) decided that the time has to be fairly short, and the power can't be terribly high, which means they need more bandwidth. Short pulses and digitally spread-spectrum signals both have high bandwidths.
It is considerably hard to design a filter that h
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Thanks - I wasn't aware of those tradeoffs. I have done a little bit of filter design though; even at frequencies lower than those and with good design software, analog filter design can be a bitch. Then there's the physical implementation...
Am I correct in assuming that the biggest concern isn't necessarily a complete failure to function, but rather erroneous data?
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Yes, in general misleading data is considered a more problematic safety case than loss of function. On the aviation system I am familiar with, "not working" has no safety effect, unexpected loss of function has a "minor" safety effect, but an undetected error has (potentially) "hazardous/severe-major" safety effect.
For context, depending on the exact safety standard that applies there are one or two levels between "minor" and "hazardous", and one level above "hazardous". Each level of safety effect normal
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> happily in use with no adverse effects in many parts of the world with closer 5G bands than what is under discussion here.
No politician or bureaucrat is going to greenlight anything that MAY even cause issues. There would be considerable backlash if there was even one death. However, there is NO punishment in exerting excessive control unnecessarily.
Sound familiar?
Translation service enabled... (Score:3)
"an enormous negative impact on the aviation industry"
TRANSLATION BOT:
"please give us some money"
This is real risk. (Score:4, Informative)
I am a pilot and an aircraft owner. My aircraft is certified and fully equipped for IFR using traditional navaids (I have two nav radios, one with a VOR/LOC indicator and the other with a VOR/LOC/GS indicator). I also have a WAAS GPS receiver which I use for navigation.
GPS operates in the L1 band with a carrier frequency of 1575.42 MHz and a bandwidth of 13.345 MHz.
The telcos are operating "5G" channels with carriers between 1475 - 1518 MHz and bandwidths of up to 20 MHz.
I can tell you that very recently, when I pass over certain urban areas near newly erected 5G towers, the GPS reception goes bonkers. It's really disconcerting when you are flying the plane for your annunciator to start yelling "terrain pull up" at you when you are at 3000' AGL. The frequency allocations are just too close together. You could put really narrow bandpass filters on the GPS receivers in aircraft, but this will be a very, very expensive process and will be very time consuming. All the avionics shops in the southeast are backed up for months and months. Filters installed in aircraft require TSO approval, and a change in equipment requires that the IFR certification on the aircraft be redone.
Three of these towers just went up around my hometown in the mountains of North Carolina... Someday soon, someone's annunciation system won't go off and a pilot flying in unfamiliar territory or in a high workload situation is going to fly an aircraft into the side of a mountain who would have otherwise lived.
I see a lot of propaganda out there from the telcos saying that planes are not falling out of the sky in other countries... but airspace conditions and radio spectrum congestion are a lot different in other countries (as are the frequencies themselves). Remember, just about everyone in this country will eventually have a transmitter operating in this spectrum in their pockets.
How many people need to die before the government realizes how badly they screwed up and does something to solve the problem? Either shift the frequency allocation, or subsidize the retrofitting of the aircraft navigation systems. Regardless, this is going to take a lot of time.
Re:This is real risk. (Score:5, Insightful)
subsidize the retrofitting of the aircraft navigation systems
So you could make your instruments ignore frequencies they're not supposed to use, but you want someone else to pay for it. I understand that some manufacturers have been less than prudent about their electromagnetic compatibility and that this problem may be too widespread to be ignored, but then the aircraft industry needs to find a way to compensate the public for the use of the spectrum that they're "using" without a license, not the other way around.
Re:This is real risk. (Score:4, Insightful)
What? They did not. Telcos merely operate within the band allocated to them.
It's the aviation industry's fault their instruments are designed to expect surrounding frequencies to be unused.
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YAGNI maybe wasn't a bad choice for a long time, but you can't shift responsibility to the other party because you decided to save some cost.
So they used to be unused, but you shouldn't have the right to assume that they will remain so indefinitely.
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> you shouldn't have the right to assume that they will remain so indefinitely.
It would be wasteful in aggregate to make planes pay for extra tech they don't need in the foreseeable future. We want an efficient economy, and chasing far off what-if's can be inefficient. It's not really about "rights", but about practical use of USA's resources. Planes need to be light in weight, and extra tech goes against that. YAGNI was reasonable here.
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YAGNI was reasonable here.
That's fine, I'd tend to agree with you. But you can't make an assumption, build your thing, then turn around and say other person is responsible when they are doing something that violates your assumptions. As long as what the other party is doing is legal, your assumptions are yours to deal with, not theirs.
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> your assumptions are yours to deal with, not theirs.
No, society as a whole eats the cost, as plane fares go up to compensate.
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It would be wasteful in aggregate to make planes pay for extra tech they don't need in the foreseeable future.
Aircraft tend to have a long service life. In such a case the "foreseeable future" is only a small subset of "the future".
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> but you want someone else to pay for it.
Telcos created the problem, not the aviation industry.
I think the government should refund all the money paid for the spectrum and all of the funds put into the 5G rollouts to date, and then charge all that back to aviation industry. I certainly do not want to pay for it as a tax payer.
It seems cheaper to just fix the altimeters. But if you prefer you can pay for the rest of the fixing elsewhere and keep the altimeters.
There are only so many solutions. I'm in favor of the one that costs the taxpayer (me) the least. I suspect fixing the aircraft is cheaper
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Actually, the instruments are operating within their specified tolerances, which were approved by the same government that in turn sold of the necessary buffer spectrum.
The GPS navigation systems are evaluated by the government and are issued supplemental type certificates with approved model lists of aircraft in which they can be installed.
The problem is that the government approved the GPS navigation systems and then allocated spectrum to some other use which was necessary to remain unused for these GPS n
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I don't understand the failure mode here that would cause incorrect position reporting. Lack of GPS signal causes lack of GPS precision, not *incorrect* positioning. Its reflections/mirroring and other issues causing packets to show up later than they should that cause incorrect positioning.
Not to mention the "backup" traditional pressure based altimeter available when you lose GPS signal.
And of course, the fact that all this dialog is about ground radar altimeters and not GPS reception.
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You are correct. However, the vertical position error seems to be in the order of several thousand feet when it does happen.
GPS altimeters need to be accurate to within a few feet.
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Also, your autopilot isn't coupled to your traditional pressure altimeter...
Re:This is real risk. (Score:5, Interesting)
Won't the GPS receivers have to be replaced anyway when L1 is retired in the next few years? In fact, I'm pretty sure the L1 retirement was supposed to have already happened by now but was delayed as it took longer than expected to get the new GPS satellites launched. If I read the FCC's latest information on this correctly, your GPS receiver will stop functioning sometime in 2024 time frame.
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How many people need to die before the government realizes how badly they screwed up and does something to solve the problem?
How many people need to fly in conditions that require IRF vs how many people want to have high bandwidth mobile communications? Fix you kit or step aside.
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I don't think you realize the regulatory and technical challenges of "fix you kit" when it comes to avionics. I worked on the supplemental type certification (STC) for having Wifi onboard the MD80, 737, 777, and 757 aircraft. Thousands of hours of testing were involved to submit to the FAA for approval and certification. Nothing on an aircraft that becomes part of it, including the service carts, gets onboard without certification much less an avionics certified Wifi access point. Couple that on 10s of thou
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"5G" in the USA operates nowhere near the spectrum you claim: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Also, I'm inclined to call BS on your TAS alert issue. When any competent GPS receiver loses its fix it tells the rest the avionics that fact so that NAV and the rest can go to dead-reckoning or some other fallback and ignore GPS until it announces "good fix" again.
To further the BS call, can you tell me how you know, by sight, that a tower is "5G"? Do they have big "5G here!" flags flapping in the breeze? Are you
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If your certified, WAAS enabled, instruments is not immune to nearby interference and, most importantly, do not detect a jammed GPS and compute a wrong fix and trigger GPWS then your instruments are defective. Have them repaired or replaced.
I'm sorry (Score:3)
...but Boeing doesn't need 5G to harm the safety.
Meanwhile (Score:2)
Does 5G actually give us any real world benefits? The ability to blow through your monthly cap in less than 1 second and be throttled to dial-up speeds the rest of the time isn't much of a benefit. Does it mean I can get from the (fake) ringing sound to the inevitable round of "Can you still hear me?" even faster?
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omfgwtfbbq stop asking this question, which has been answered every goddamned time there is a discussion on 5G, literally. The primary benefit of 5G isn't more bandwidth to a single device, it's more aggregate bandwidth to many devices, especially when many of them are in the same area.
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Re: Meanwhile (Score:2)
Yes, that is the ostensible primary use case. The other big use is for places which get crowds, like stadiums.
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I ask because it keeps not doing anything for anyone that properly done 4G didn't already do. The odds that 5G will be properly done are no better because we don't have now telecomm corporations to go with the new technology.
Engineering study (Score:1)
Technical details (Score:3)
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RTCA (Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics), a well-respected body that developed the most commonly used safety & testing requirements for commercial aircraft (including subsystems and components), issued a white paper with all the relevant details; for those who understand radio frequencies, have a look at https://www.rtca.org/wp-conten... [rtca.org]
my question is, and has been-
How did no one notice this was an issue until after the rollout?
How Does the delay impact the 5G vaccine chip? ;p (Score:2)
how will I finally be able to have internet everywhere without having to use my phone? I'm even wearing a tinfoil hat antenna and I am still not getting 5G...
What do you mean it's not real? I am very sad and disappointed :p
FAA is anti-science about this issue (Score:2)
The FCC has studies showing the FAA's stance is not realistic, but the FAA is taking the approach that the FCC needs to prove their fears are unfounded. That is anti-science. A science based approach would be for the FAA to do some studies and generate some evidence that there might be an issue
History repeats itself (Score:2)
The US Navy was in the middle of deploying a new IFF (Friend or Foe) transponder system and somebody at the FAA decided that there "could" be interference with commercial aviation without so much as running the numbers or doing a test to see if it actually would do that. The issue went all the way up the chain of command and a coworker of mine was selected to argue the case for the US Navy. The FAA/Navy circus went on for years and the bottom line is there was no proven interference but the ships still need
Other countries? (Score:2)
So FAA lax regulation == FCCs fault ? (Score:2)
The FAA basically wants to drive a 7 lane wide truck down a one lane wide bi-directional highway and blame any accidents on anyone it hits on the way.