A study published in Telecom on June 1, 2026, measured worker RF exposure across eight private 5G installations in Slovenia, Germany and Belgium — covering ports, warehouses, production sites, offices and research facilities. The networks ran at 3.5 GHz and 26 GHz, in both standalone and non-standalone configurations.
The authors report that exposure in indoor industrial settings with pico base stations stayed orders of magnitude below regulatory limits. They note the result depends on factors like antenna height and density, and that most networks studied still carry very little traffic.
"In a typical indoor industrial environment where pico 5G base stations are deployed, the measured exposure was found to be no greater than 0.006% of the Directive 2013/35/EU action value and 0.03% of the ICNIRP guideline limits for the general public."
"In all analyzed scenarios, the RF EMF exposure from private 5G standalone networks was found to be well below occupational exposure limits, even under worst-case conditions."
"While this study provides a comprehensive evaluation of worker RF EMF exposure within an operational smart industry environment, the results are based on a limited set of private networks within Smart Industry 4.0. Consequently, extrapolating these results to broader industrial sectors and settings requires caution."
Workers' Exposure Due to Private 5G Networks
Valič, Plets, Vermeeren, Apostolidis, Gajšek Telecom Journal Level 1ⓘ
