Telstra's 5G stress test - a busy apartment, 58 devices and the all important 5G EME test for safety.

There’s still a few things the mobile networks need to get straight about 5G – despite their best efforts, there’s still a bunch of clowns who think 5G is dangerous, and there’s the skeptics who worry it won’t cope under load. Telstra put that to the test recently in a Gold Coast Apartment.

Telstra’s EME guru Mike Wood set out to pack a single apartment with a stack of devices, loads of connectivity and put the network to the test as well as check the safety of a small apartment packed with Tech!

Here’s how they did it.

In a Gold Coast Apartment with two bedrooms, a large living area, home office and entertainment zone plus kitchen they installed everything from smart TVs to smart speakers, games consoles and invited a bunch of people including device hungry kids around to put it to the test.

For connectivity, there were a couple of the HTC 5G Hubs for 5G network access and WiFi, as well as 5G mobile phones in the apartment.

In total, when you take in the Smart Doorbell, Baby Monitor, Smart Scales, Smart Lights, Laptops, Printers, all that stuff – there were a staggering 58 devices.

In a small apartment – that’s crazy. We have 66 connected at home, and that’s a big four bedroom family home.

According to Mike’s Blog at Telstra’s Exchange website, speeds were acceptable for the entire weekend, he said “The 5G network delivered great performance for all the connected devices, with a typical speed ranging from 300-500 Mbps. This meant gaming, streaming movies, sharing updates and connecting with friends on social media all at the same time happened without breaking a sweat – really pushing the teenagers to try and find enough to do to max it out!”

Going on to say “The home office also performed very well for the kids to catch up on school assignments and for the parents to work on the Monday. (That was the trade-off for a long weekend on the Gold Coast!)”

Ahh, but what about the Tin Foil hat wearing 5G doomsdayers?

Well, we’ve covered this before, but here’s what Mike and his team found over that weekend.

The highest EME (Electrimagnetic Energy) levels recorded across the weekend was during the dinner party with the most people there and most devices in use. Even then, the number was 0.008% of the SAFE LIMIT.

That’s more 10,000 times below the public EME safety limit. And that’s all signals operating.

Here’s a graph of the WiFi in use, 3G, 4G and 5G all circulating around the apartment airwaves.

For some perspective on that, the local TV and radio stations operated at a remarkably similar level.

Oh, and as we know from previous tests, that baby monitor – it’s the most “harmful” of all the devices, with an EME level still 123 times below the public safety limit.

So, over the holiday period, don’t be afraid to push your network to the limit, and don’t listen to the tin foil hat conspiracy theories – block them on Facebook and don’t share them.