Audio only

Always Connected

From Marconi to 5G: The Story of the Wireless WorldBy Anita S. Sunde
Listen with Sir Michael Caine™ and 1,000+ voices
Length4h 58m

About this audiobook

Five billion people use a mobile phone. That number exceeds the population with access to clean water. It exceeds the number with access to electricity. Nobody planned this. It happened because a series of ideas, developed over more than a century, converged into a technology so useful and so affordable that billions of people chose it as the first piece of modern infrastructure they would own.  Always Connected  tells the story of how that happened — from James Clerk Maxwell’s equations in the 1860s to the 5G networks and satellite constellations. It is the story of engineers trying to solve small problems who ended up changing everything, of entrepreneurs who bet on technologies nobody yet believed in, and of governments that discovered that communications infrastructure is power. Written to be read rather than studied, this is popular history for anyone who has ever wondered how the invisible technology they depend on every hour of every day actually came to exist.

Audiobook details

GenreHistory, Technology
Length4 hrs 58 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateMay 2, 2026
LanguageEnglish

Table of contents

1Introduction
2Prologue
3Part One
4Waves
5Radio Goes to War
Show all chapters
6The Cellular Idea
7The Brick
8Part Two
91G: The Telephone Leaves Home
102G: The World Goes Digital
113G: The Internet in Your Pocket (Almost)
12The Phone That Changed Everything
134G: Everyone, Always, Everywhere
14Part Three
15Towers
16Spectrum
17Part Four
185G: The Network That Is Not About Phones
19Huawei and the Technology Cold War
20The Sky Joins the Network
21The Network and Power
22Appendix
23Endnote

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