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Wi-Fi health concerns increase
By Stevie Smith May 22, 2007, 15:26 GMT
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Older Talkback
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Gaiacomm International technology does not hurt the environment....It is true 4G WIMAX technology...they got the WIMAX award in 2005....
You also forgot to mention that Panoramas official findings, when measuring radio emissions from Mobile masts and wifi laptops, was based 100m from a mobile mast, and 1m from a wifi point.
Doesn't seem like a fair test to me.
Plus, last I heard Microwave ovens used the same frequency as wifi...
Well I've been listening to Radio4 for 3 years and I keep getting all these screaming victorian drama's spinning round and round and round quickly followed by a scientific narrative of the months political affairs.
Talk about radiation...
And what about those satellites that they point at people with bad NI contributions.
The test is probably done in 100m from a mobile mast and a meter from a wifi hotspot because that's a real life example. You'll never have a mobile mast on your desk or anywhere near. Also a mobile mast sits a few meters above the ground usually. As for the microwave ovens they use the same frequency but I suppose that they are in a shielded environment and microwaves should not escape the oven. If you suspect something like that you should return your oven back.
I could be wrong in what I am saying but mobile phone industry and wi fi have invested so much money that they will do anything to prove that is not bad for our health.
look at anything that now we are saying it is causing health problems and how many people probably have cancer...
That's because one device alone may not harm you but the combined and continues exposure to radiation will deffinetly fry us one day.
Poor scientific evidence and heresay.
It's like mobile phones and CJD again. How many parants still don't eat beef?
Aggelos reckons 1m from a wireless point is a real life example??
Use a ethernet cable, tard.
The main problem is that it's almost impossible to prove that WiFi does not affect health. You can only conduct tests to show that it does. No such evidence currently exists.
The test of WiFi vs Mobile phone masts is a rediculous one. The level of radiation from a mobile phone.. held around 5cm from your head is so vastly greater than that of the mast as to make the mast's radiation insignificant at realistic distances.
A 1m distance from a WiFi hotspot is again a ridiculous test, if you take the distance up to around 2m (which is much more realistic), then by the law of square, you get about a quarter of that radiation, so making it less than a phone mast that's 100m away.
I agree with the earlier comments, its not a realistic test, if you are 1m from a WiFi point then why bother with the wireless. WiFi in schools, etc is usually placed high up to get a better effective radius (eg. near the roof) so is likely to be more that 1m away, even if you were almost underneath it...either that or they must have very small rooms.
I live approx. 30 metres from a mobile phone mast, I have an 802.11 Access point in my home and when I sniff the airwaves I can find about 5 other WiFi devices nearby on the 2.4 ghz band, there may be even more on the 5 ghz band but i don't know. So for sure I and others nearby are drenched in radiation from these devices and so far there have been no mutations or mysterious illness's that I know of.
As far as an installation of WiFi in a school building is concerned, I think it would be nice if the coverage and interference maps (that are made when a site is surveyed (pre and post) for an installation) were made available for review to put everyones mind at rest.
Regarding the comments about tests being carried out at a 1 metre distance I must say that that is about the distance that I am sitting right now from the WLAN device in my PC which is communicating with my access point elsewhere in my house so maybe a 1 metre test for the PC's or Laptops is a fair test as they contain a tranceiver similar to some access points.
Good point. Tell you what, just turn off your wireless and never use it again. Can't say fairer than that eh?
Also, to be sure: permanently turn off any mobile phones, microwaves, bluetooth devices, radios, televisions, walkie talkies and hospital communications. It's all well and good people complaining about it, but maybe we should be a little pro-active rather than just critical.
Hey, lets all go back to living in caves and eating raw flesh? Because of course cancer never existed back then.
Ok so here is a site with proper scientific knowledge of the issue, read it if you want to know the truth... commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/james_randerson/2007/05/why_fear_wifi.html
I installed a wireless router in my house and bought a wireless capable laptop and hooked it all up, worked perfectly and I was completely happy with it. A month or so later I started getting painful symptoms whilst falling off to sleep at night (similar to severe Visual and Auditory sleep snaps).
I spent about a year suffering from this, going to various specialists with no luck until one such specialist suggested I think about what changed in my life shortly before the symptoms first started, the only thing that sprang to mind was the wireless router. So I switched it off and I switched off my laptops radio's (wireless and Bluetooth), within a couple of weeks I was back to normal. Now it could just be coincidence as I've not been brave enough to switch it back on and see if it all starts again.
It's easy to be cynical about these health claims as 'Baltiman' and others have demonstrated, however they should consider that we are all different and what might not be damaging to them may well be damaging to others, and these expressed concerns here are not about turning us back to the 'stone age' but rather carving a better future for us all, a future where the technological choices we make are not driven by cost alone at the expense of health.
By the way Baltiman,
mobile phones – have been proven unsafe, particularly for young children.
Microwaves – are shielded and are used very infrequently and for short bursts
Bluetooth – have incredibly short range.
Radio’s – use a completely different radio frequency 30-300Mhz.
Televisions – again totally different frequency’s 30-300Mhz.
Walkie Talkies – Yep and they’re so common in the house.
Wireless LAN is in the 3-300Ghz range, only modern radars use this range currently, and its in your house, school 24 7.
Good for you, CK. Clearly you understand the concept of sarcasm and displayed the ability to encorporate wit into your anecdotes. I take my tin-foil hat off to you :-)
'Wireless LAN is in the 3-300Ghz range, only modern radars use this range currently, and its in your house, school 24 7.'
Does that mean it's capable of interfereing with modern radar? Someone better tell the US quick, before Osama bin Laden gets a BT home hub.
No wonder a teacher started suffering from migraines when a wireless network was installed - they can be a pain in the backside
Unlike the worries over mobile phones, which were consumer led, all of these worries have initially been raised by corperations. The wifi standards had to pass lots of stringent safely tests before they were approved, and I have not heard a single academic seriously suggest any concern at all (and I am a student who has talked about this with a lot of researchers/lecturers).
The only thing I can think is that telecoms companies are getting worried that if everyone gets wifi we will have no need for them anymore - why pay an ISP to deliver your network traffic/phone calls when a peer-to-peer wireless protocol would be free, nearly as secure, and faster (there would be less bottlenecks on the network once routing was worked out). Several non-profit organisations are already working towards this, and offering free phone calls and network access within cities. This would take away the entire business from Telecom operators.
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