FCC should finalize its radio frequency safety rules
In 2013, Julius Genachowski was chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. At that time, the FCC voted to update its review of the guidelines for managing the safety of wireless devices.
Over six years and two new chairmen later, this proceeding is still pending action. However, with the release of updated research from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the FCC now has the academic and scientific basis to complete that proceeding. And they should do so.
The worldwide adoption of wireless technologies over the past 20 years is unprecedented. Once almost unheard of, our usage of wireless technologies has expanded dramatically and shows no signs of slowing.
In 2018 the number of U.S households with Wi-Fi was 89% and is certainly higher today. More than half of all U.S. households rely on wireless for making voice calls. Worldwide, wireless data usage currently exceeds 29 exabytes per month and is projected to more than double by 2022. In any given group of people, it’s easier to count who does not have a wireless phone than who does.
For the majority of people in our country, wireless is not just another phone company — it is
phone company. Many modern personal computers no longer offer wired network ports. Wireless is by far the preferred method for connecting technology to the internet.
This rapid rise in adoption of wireless technologies has not set well with a small yet vociferous community opposed to their deployment. Fearful of health impacts from radio frequency (RF) sources that generate electromagnetic fields, people opposed to wireless technologies have criticized the FCC for not updating guidance on RF safety.
To be fair, regulatory agencies like the FCC in the United States and the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP) in the European Union are not staffed to conduct that level of scientific investigation. They rely on the expertise of government agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the World Health Organization, and scientific organizations like the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
The IEEE’s C.95 standard has been the basis for safety guidance at the FCC since 1966 (the ICNIRP also bases its guidance on C.95). While it has been regularly updated and expanded over the past five decades, nothing substantive has changed.
The FCC’s guidance from 1996 is as applicable to the upcoming fifth-generation “5G” technologies as it was to the original analog “1G” cellphones carried by our parents. Critics of the FCC have argued that its safety guidance hasn’t changed over the past two decades. This is true because the underlying science and physics haven’t changed.
Yet the FCC’s incomplete 2013 proceeding on RF safety has loomed large in the minds of conspiracy theorists who see it as “evidence” that the FCC “knows” there’s something nefarious happening with wireless technologies.
With the 2019 release of IEEE C.95, the FCC now has an updated scientific basis for closing the 2013 proceeding — in the interest of informed public discourse and transparency, the FCC should do so with the utmost haste.