Social media users are today gleefully sharing footage of installation engineers being confronted and harassed as they work to deploy 5G in various parts of the UK.
Masts in Birmingham and Merseyside have been targeted and destroyed over erroneous claims that they're linked to the spread of Coronavirus around the world.
It's worth noting early on that a country with almost blanket 5G coverage (South Korea) is considered one of the most successful in the world at bringing COVID-19 under control. At the time of writing, they have a fraction of deaths compared to countries like the UK and United States.
So why is this happening now?
Actually, this scene has been played out before. At the turn of the millenium, members of the public were being bombarded with stories of how mobile phone use dramatically increases the risk of cancer. Now that the majority of the world uses this technology, that's now considered to be nonsense. Some people who used mobile phones went on to develop cancer, but smaller minds tend to associate correlation with causation. The fact is that those poor individuals were almost certainly going to develop those conditions anyway.
Almost every new generation of mobile technology has attracted fresh theories about health risks, and similar 5G theories were already widespread before the pandemic but have been given life becuase of erroneous links to coronavirus. Other variants on the baseless theory suggest the virus has instead been invented as cover for deaths caused by 5G rollout, while groups that previously claimed the mobile signal caused cancer or brain damage are now suggesting it is also responsible for a respiratory disease.
The British public stands ready, pitchforks in hand to attack this latest technological development which stands to dramatically improve our ability as a species to communicate.
5G fibre engineers (the teams that link up the masts) are dealing with verbal and physical threats during the lockdown, as conspiracy theories linking coronavirus to 5G technology is spread by celebrities who are also encouraging members of the public to target those maintaining vital mobile phone and broadband networks.
Facebook has already removed an anti-5G group in which users were being encouraged to supply footage of them destroying mobile phone equipment, with some seemingly under the pretence that it may stop the spread of coronavirus and some even running leaderboards of where equipment had been targeted.
Video footage of a 70ft (20 metre) telephone mast on fire in Birmingham this week also circulated widely alongside claims it was targeted by anti-5G protesters. BT-owned provider, EE told the Guardian that its engineers were still on site assessing the cause of the fire but it “looks likely at this time” that it was arson.
EE said it will be working with the police to find the culprits:
'To deliberately take away mobile connectivity at a time when people need it more than ever to stay connected to each other, is a reckless, harmful and dangerous thing to do. We will try to restore full coverage as quickly as possible, but the damage caused by the fire is significant.'
In a truly embarassing indictment of our society, engineers working for BT Openreach, who deliver much of the end-point connectivity across the UK, had to plead with the public to be spared on-street abuse as they are not involved in maintaining mobile networks in any way whatsoever.
An industry lobby group, Mobile UK claims that this is impacting work to maintain home working and providing critical connectivity to the emergency services, vulnerable consumers and hospitals. Telecoms engineers are considered key workers under the government’s guidelines. A video that has had millions of views on Twitter shows people working for the broadband company 'Community Fibre' are abused by a woman who claimed that they were installing 5G as part of a plot to kill the population.
“When they turn this on, it’s going to kill everyone,and that’s why they’re building the hospitals,” she tells the engineers on a London street. “Do you have children, do you have parents? When they turn that switch on, bye bye momma. Are they paying you well enough to kill people?”
A spokesperson for the company later confrimed tha it doesn't use 5G anywhere in its network and praised the calm response of its staff.
We reported yesterday that Sky has been facing equipment failure and broadband outages across the UK, and now attempts to strengthen the 'backbone' of our infrastructure are being halted by people with no understanding of the true effects of non-ionising radiation that is associated with these technologies.
Indeed, 30 minutes outside on a sunny day will do more to cause cancer than ten years bathed in low-level 5G signals. Ironically, 5G actually emits a less powerful signal than 4G - as masts are closer to the ground and greater in number.
Media regulator Ofcom on Thursday warned that they were monitoring any regulated individuals or oganisations that spread the discredited therories about the dangers of 5G. Coverage is spreading rapidlly on social networks such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and Next Door.
Social media posts from celebrities such as singer Anne Marie have helped spread the theory, while Holden, a judge on Britain’s Got Talent, shared a link to a popular Change.org petition promoting the rumour that the symptoms of coronavirus are in reality due to residing near a 5G mast. The petition was subsequently removed following inquiries from the Guardian.
International radiation experts have made it very clear that new high-speed mobile systems don't pose a risk to humans, while pointing out that the coronavirus has spread widely in many countries without any 5G coverage, such as Iran.
Pete has worked in the telecoms industry for 16 years - and launched this comparison service to provide a better deal to customers nationwide.
