| Product: |
Mobile phone safety |
| Date: |
05/02/04 (2118 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Radiation levels drop, We culd pay less for phones
Disadvantages: Lanscapes may not look as purty
I'm not going to specifically write about how dangerous mobile phones are, as so many people have done that before me here on dooyoo, and I don't think that I would be able to improve on anything anyone has written so far. Especially the piece by MykReeve, which is right at the top. It is however, a little old, and it would be great if he could come back and update it for us to reflect the new findings and information we have today.
Most people do not realise that mobile phone base-stations (that's the towers you see on big hills and antennae on taller buildings) dotted all over the country are actually less harmful than your mobile phone. No. Wait. Yes they are. The radiation emitted from one of these antennae is actually less than that of your mobile phone you hold next to your head, or carry about in your pocket next to your heart or, God forbid, your genitals!
See, a mobile phone can move about, while the base station cannot. The radio planner guys all sit down together and have a look at where coverage is lacking, and then decide where they can build their new installations. They can adjust power levels so that they have exactly the coverage they need and not a little bit more, cos it costs them cash to pump the power up. See, we as the end-user pick up the cost of charging our mobile phones so that they can keep their equipment turned as low as possible.
Look at your mobile phone now. See those two gauges? One's for battery power and the other is for signal strength. As the signal strength weakens then the battery, the transmitter and receiver on the phone have to work harder to make sure that your phone call to your mum about not having any clean pants doesn't get broken off. This means that there's more radiation being pumped out of your phone as it works harder to get a strong enough signal through to the base-station a couple of miles away.
Vicious circle, eh?
The Government, under the EU
, has put into place a set of exposure guidelines, called International Commissions Non-Ionising Radiation Protection, or ICNIRP for short. These cover not only guidelines for members of the public and their exposure to radiation from mobile phone transmitting stations, but also people who work in the telecommunications industry and are therefore more liable to exposure.
These guidelines and the values for how much radiation is given off has been agreed in Brussels and passed out to all of us muppets who pay money to other countries in order to get nothing in return. Well, sorta. In Britain, the highest INCNIRP value that has been recorded is well within the guidelines at about 1/4 of the maximum public exposure value. That's the maximum recorded in the country and the majority of all the other values wherever you go is on average about 3/100ths of the guideline value. So, according to Brussels, we're probably the safest country in Europe when it comes to mobile phone masts. Yay for us!
We could, however, still do a lot better. One way of doing this is to actually increase the number of transmitters. Yeah, increase them. Instead of having a few hundred sites dotted all over somewhere the size of London, have a few thousand. Install ultra-low powered, multi-user transmitters in every third street light and no only would coverage be brilliant for each of the operators, but the ICNIRP would be negligible.
Mobile phones would not have to work as hard either, cutting down on whatever radiation they send out as well, and seeing as it's more than the base-stations, this is obviously a good thing. That's why campaigners in the know want more of them around schools, not less.
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