How Does 5G Effect Your IT Support?

With 93.2% of the U.S. population covered by a 5G network, 5G is finally (mostly) here. We have been hearing about it for a long time – many of us have our 5G smart phones, which were operating on 4G for a while. Now all four major Los Angeles carriers (AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, and T-Mobile) claim to have 5GF availability – but not all areas are covered yet, although it is to be presumed that the coverage will soon be blanket.

Can I use 5G on my computer?

Yes, 5G is going to revolutionize standard office network infrastructure, even though people tend to think of 5G as ‘phone-centric’. In anticipation of the widespread availability of 5G, major computer manufacturers like Dell, HP, and Lenovo started introducing 5-G-enabled computers as early as 2020.

However, the broadband capabilities and internet speed provided by 5G will not be usable to old-school computers – any more than it will be usable to 4G smart phone owners.

Phone junkies with neck pain from staring down at their mobile screens all day are loving the speed of 5G, but this facet of 5G will have a much smaller impact on business than 5G Broadband for the internet. In Information Technology, the main impact of 5G will be in cybersecurity.

How will 5G affect cybersecurity?

The risk of 5G is that it will exponentially broaden a network’s attack surface. The attack surface consists of the total number of access points which can easily become exploitable vulnerabilities to cybercriminals.

Forbes’ Vinod Yeruva states: “5G’s dynamic software-based systems have far more traffic routing points than the current hardware-based, centralized hub-and-spoke designs that 4G has.” Think of being on the front lines in battle and trading in your steel helmet for a colander. You’ve got a lot of holes to plug.

Want a good way to test for your IT guy – whether internal or outsourced? Ask them what preparations they have made in anticipation of widespread 5G availability for business networks (especially your own). If they do not have an answer, you have a problem. For years, good Managed IT Services providers have been studying both the known and the possible effects 5G will have on their clients’ networks.

What are the negatives of 5G?

For service carriers, it’s hard to install and deploy. More transmitters are needed to cover the same area as current 4G networks. Providers are still working on placement for some of these ‘cells.’ Some regions have physical challenges like protected historical sites or rough geography.

For the user, it comes down to maintaining effective network security and having enough data storage capacity – due to the huge data files which can now be sent with ease. There is a lot we do not know about any unforeseen complications that 5G will bring. 5G has yet to redefine the vulnerabilities associated with security threats – such as privacy, security, and trust. There is still uncertainty as to how the platform will protect its users with the quantum leap in the amount of data that will be traveling through cyberspace.

Certainly, cybercrime and fraud are expected to rise – even more dramatically than they have since the advent of COVID and the transition to a much larger remote workforce. You’re in good shape if you have quality IT support, because they should be ready for it, with mechanisms in place for the event that an end-user clicks on a malicious link or attachment in a phishing email.

This is yet another strong reason to educate your employees with ongoing Security Awareness Training – since human error is responsible for over 90% of successful cyber-attack intrusions. No matter how good your IT services or the defenses they set up are, they can never stop an employee from clicking on something they shouldn’t.

Health Concerns

Is 5G safe? This is a fair question and has been the subject of debate for decades – ever since the first cell towers appeared. The debate isn’t about the towers, but about the invisible energy fields that emanate from them: EMFs.

What does EMF mean?

‘Electric and Magnetic Fields’ was the original term but has evolved into the more commonly used ‘Electro-Magnetic Fields,’ but whatever you call it there is one undeniable fact: this is radiation. We all know that radiation is essentially bad for you, but the question is of the level.

Healthline cites that most of the limited studies performed to examine any potential health dangers from EMFs have been described as ‘inconclusive’. In their conclusion, they state: “Currently, there’s no solid evidence that 5G causes negative health effects in humans or animals. Most researchers have studied EMFs in general and found mixed results.”

How much comfort does that offer? 5G towers are going up everywhere, affecting all of us one way or another, and the best we can get are ‘mixed results.’ The same fears were going around at advent of the microwave oven, so perhaps it offers a small measure of reassurance that after 60+ years, nobody has died from a microwave oven – unless it was dropped on their head (no known cases of that, either).

It's surprising that so few studies exist about the potential effects of 5G, which can use both high and low frequencies, but the smart money in the scientific community is that it will be predominantly high frequency, which harbor the possibilities of more harmful effects.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) states that the public is casually exposed to very low frequencies of EMFs from a variety of technologies - levels deemed too low to cause considerable tissue heating or other concerns, such as cognitive loss or cancer.

As with all new or exponentially upgraded technologies, we will have to wait and see.