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Wednesday, November 6, 2024

Letter on EMI

Further to William Thomas’ article on CityWest’s system I will not labour the many misunderstandings  concerning Electromagnetic Interference (EMI) one can find on the web because there are a multitude of scientific studies on the effects of EMI, or ‘idiopathic environmental illness with attribution to electromagnetic fields (IEI-EMF)’ as it is known to the many scientists who have studied the effects on human beings.  If interested you could start with this article on the website Science Based Medicine:

“Electromagnetic hypersensitivity” and “wifi allergies”: Bogus diagnoses with tragic real world consequences

where you will find a summary of claims and actual scientific research and can follow links to many controlled studies on the health concerns of EMI.  And note in particular that the author never questions the pain sufferers claim is caused by EMI; he questions only the claim of causation.

What I will say however is my surprise in Thomas failing to mention that optical cable will actually effect a small reduction in overall EMI as it neither generates EMI or is interfered by EMI as is copper cable.  His reference, Jeromy Johnson, does not mention this fact directly but calls our attention to ‘converters’ which convert the electrical data signal to an optical one and back again.  Now the electrical signal has only to be converted to optical at source once, say in Prince Rupert or Vancouver, after which it simply needs amplifiers, not converters, along the course of the optical line to prevent the degradation of the signal which affects all types of signal propagation.  There will not be masses of converters on our road sides.  The signal will have to be converted back to electrical once it reaches it’s destination to be of use in our electrical devices.  This conversion will take place in the new modem.  Comparing CityWest’s Gigaspire Blast u6 to the Telus ActionTec T3200M that most of us on the island are already using I find that the power supplies—you know, that little black thing you plug into the wall outlet—are rated equally at 12vDC and 3 amps.  You can’t get out more power than you put in. The difference between the two is that the Blast u6 contains an optical to electrical converter and is connected directly to the network with an optical cable.  The T3200M has no converter and is connected to the network by a RJ11 copper wire plug.  Jeromy identifies the power supply as the culprit and states that an optical modem’s power supply ‘can generate high amounts of wide-spectrum EMI (electromagnetic interference)’.  But as we have seen, the power supply of the modem you already have is rated the same as the optical one you will get from CityWest.  Thus it is unclear where all Jeromy’s greatly increased EMI is coming from but if the power supply really did emit vastly increased EMI then your Telus modem has been doing so for years.

I know that EMI is very real and have tasted its effects.  When I was a kid in the late 1940’s I could be listening to Wayne and Schuster on the AM radio when a truck revved its engine outside our house.  The radio was immediately hit by a wave of EMI from the truck’s generator causing the two comedians to break up in a hail of static until the truck moved on.  I could discern no effect from it other than missing one of the duo’s jokes or distortion of Terry Dale’s mellifluous voice.  AM radio’s susceptibility to EMI is why today we mainly listen to FM.  It is another reason why our cars now have alternators rather than the generators of my youth.

And a final note.  We are urged to use a cable connection and have the CityWest technicians turn off WiFi permanently.  This at the very time most of us are using portable devices which cannot be cabled.  Ask your children and grandchildren how this would sit with them!  What a conundrum.

Oakley Rankin

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