Do we use more electricity because of 5G? I confess I'd assume modern phones and repeater networks use less power than older ones. Even at large.

I can easily agree that phones that have internet capabilities use more, as a whole, than those that didn't. The infrastructure needs were very different. But, especially if you are comparing to 4G technology, much of that infrastructure already had to distribute content that was driving the extra use.

I would think this would be like cars. If you had taken the estimates of how much pollution vehicles did 40 years ago and assume that that was going to be constant even as the number of cars went up, you'd probably assume we are living in the worst air imaginable. Instead, even gas cars got far better as time went on.

Doesn't mean the problem went away, of course. And some sources of the polution, like tires, did get worse as total makeup as we scaled up. Hopefully we can find ways to make that better, as well.

> Do we use more electricity because of 5G? I confess I'd assume modern phones and repeater networks use less power than older ones. Even at large.

If we did exactly the same with 5G than what we did with 4G, it would be more efficient.

But why do we develop 5G? Because we can do more. It is more efficient, but we do much more, so we increase our energy consumption. This is called the "rebound effect". It's observed for every. single. technology.

As a data point, I turn 5G off on my phone and get several hours more battery life using 4G. I'm pretty sure the higher bandwidth is consuming more energy, especially since 5G works at shorter distances and probably needs the power to stay connected to cell towers.

The phones, towers, and networks are only the tip of the power iceberg. How much electricity are we burning to run the servers to service the requests that all these 5G phones can now make because of all the wonderfully cheap wireless connectivity?