Having watched this programme 'click' earlier today , it is IMO very concerning and I can't see why we in this island nation would even need it.

Worth watching to the end , 25 mins of enlightenment. Maybe this is what Edward Snowden was engaged in ?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0004v9t/click-5g-whizz

We already have 5G in Liverpool as one of the trial areas, there is a game of spot-the-antenna going on.

I use some Huawei equipment here and I would concur that the software quality is poor but generally functional.

Its quite amusing the UK talking about foreign countries having backdoors into systems, its something that we have a poor track record on.

I have less concern with software backdoors than hardware backdoors, it would be very easy to produce a chip that had some extra functionality built in without it being easily discovered.

Higher frequencies mean more attenuation by buildings and therefore more antennas. The estimate I've seen is 400,000 across the UK! Do we want that? In my opinion there are far too many buildings disfigured by a load of ugly ironmongery on top of them already!

As a narrowboater, I know how poor coverage is outside cities and the main roads connecting them - getting ANY 'G' is impossible over huge swathes of the countryside. Rather than buggering about with 5G, we'd probably be better spending the money on simply better basic phone coverage.

You won't even notice a lot of the 5G antennas, they can be mounted inside street lamps, traffic lights, shop signs etc.

5G doesn't doesn't particularly relate to higher frequencies, in the UK some of 5G is in the 700Mhz band, even if we had stuck to 3G the higher frequencies would have been used to increase user capacity.

The majority of households have wifi which could become virtually redundant.

When an efficient 5G system comes into play, the could be systems provided with large area cells to cover your canals, this is something that is near impossible with the current 3G network because a large area cell would have too many users, the 5G network is highly "intelligent" and could keep people off a wide area cell unless they specifically need it.

more information on 5G.