on 11 December 2003, 22:00
by staff
The mobile telephone industry spent many years – and millions of dollars – fighting charges that wireless handsets could cause brain cancer. Now it looks like the budding wi-fi movement could face its own legal crisis with lawsuits alleging that 802.11 networks can cause similar physical problems.
A few families in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, Illinois, have filed a class-action lawsuit against Oak Park Elementary School’s District 97. They assert that wireless local-area networks (WLAN) in the school buildings expose their children to potential harm. Their suit points to a “substantial body of evidence that high frequency electro-magnetic radiation poses substantial and serious health risks, particularly to growing children.” The suit does not seek financial damages, but an end to the use of wi-fi in the neighborhood’s schools.
The Wi-Fi Alliance, an industry group with members including Intel, Microsoft, Philips, and IBM, is aware of the suit, and says it will continue to pay attention to developments. “It’s natural when you hear about litigation for people to take notice,” says Alliance chairman Dennis Eaton. “Members are sensitive to the amount of time and effort that might have to be spent defending themselves.”
The small suit could have big ramifications, particularly with wi-fi vendors. Global sales of 802.11 networks reached almost $1.3 billion through the first three quarters of this year, according to market research firm Dell’Oro Group. Tens of millions of people use the technology now, and the company predicts that the number will grow to 707 million by 2008, says Pyramid Research.
Furthermore, as public hotspots invade hotels, airports, and coffee shops, an enormous number of people could claim to be adversely and unknowingly affected by WLANs. That is a key point of the lawsuit. “We have not established a level that can be considered safe or even tolerably safe,” says Ron Baiman, one of the parents who filed the lawsuit. “Our thinking is that it is certainly prudent at this point not to use these in public schools.”
Science, however, may not be on the parents’ side. “In our contact with radiologists and physicians in the Oak Park community, the University of Illinois, and the Illinois Institute of Technology, there were simply no studies that could be brought to our attention that could prove its harm,” says Steve Chowanski, director of management information services for the school district. In addition, wi-fi equipment must meet FCC and EPA emission standards before coming to market. “I think the parents that filed suit are concerned about a cover-up among the commercial interests in the industry,” he adds. “I feel that they do not believe that the standards in place should be used as the benchmark of whether this is safe or not.”
Because there appear to be no studies that specifically measure the biological impact of 802.11 transmissions, the debate is left to analogy. Studies with cell phones and other devices, which do not match the high frequency and low power of wi-fi, are used as comparables. Web sites that Mr. Baiman mentions as sources of information on the problems only list abstracts of studies and do not provide access to the original documents that have the details necessary to judge the accuracy of the analogy.
“The power level of wi-fi is much smaller,” says Robert Olsen, a Washington State University professor of electrical engineering, who thinks that the comparison is flawed. According to John Moulder, a professor of radiation oncology at the Medical College of Wisconsin and skeptic of many of the health charges that have been made concerning cellular phones, there are many more studies that don’t expose the detrimental effects of wi-fi than those that do. “A few people have claimed to have found effects, but a larger number have claimed the opposite,” Mr. Moulder says.
That means there are no definite answers to quell worries on either side of the argument, and that opens a world for other factors. Mehmet Unsoy, a consultant, and former chief wireless architect and vice president of technology at British Cellular service provider mm02, notes that even cellular studies that discount the potential for harm have followed subjects only for a few years, and have not examined the long-term implications of younger people being exposed.
WLANs expose people to only a tiny portion of the radiation that they are subjected to from TV, radio, microwave phone relays, wireless and cell phones, and other devices. According to Robert Cleveland, a scientist in the FCC’s office of engineering and technology, the average person is exposed to about one microwatt per square centimeter of RF (radio frequency) radiation in ordinary life. At a distance of two feet, using a worst-case calculation with the highest outputs allowable, an 802.11b (the most commonly used version of wi-fi) transmitter would deliver about double that. At the frequencies used by wi-fi, the FCC safety limit on RF exposure is 1,000 microwatts per square centimeter. Even with multiple wi-fi devices operating in the same room at even greater distances, there is relatively little RF exposure.
Another exacerbating factor on the part of the parents is a strong distrust of business and government. Mr. Baiman, for example claims “an enormous institutional and financial repression” on the part of wireless-related companies of additional information that would bear out the dangers of wi-fi. He dismisses Mr. Moulder as someone funded by the telecommunications industry.
Mr. Moulder says that he receives all of his funding from the National Cancer Institute, the National Cancer Society, and the American Heart Association, but understands the basis of mistrust. “People see things that look like scientific arguments and see references to papers that mention effects and cannot take them within the right context,” Mr. Moulder notes. “And it doesn’t help that scientists have sometimes lied to people in the past.” The tobacco industry is an obvious shadow that crosses the issue.
Should the distrust gain traction as it did in the cellular industry, wi-fi companies and hotspot operators might find similar lawsuits growing faster than the alleged tumors that plagued the phone companies. Except these would be real.
While shopping for groceries the other day, I saw this colorfully packaged chocolate drink on the shelf. 
