
Audio only
Always Connected
From Marconi to 5G: The Story of the Wireless WorldBy Anita S. SundeLength4h 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
134G: Everyone, Always, Everywhere
2Prologue
14Part Three
3Part One
15Towers
4Waves
16Spectrum
5Radio Goes to War
17Part Four
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6The Cellular Idea
185G: The Network That Is Not About Phones
7The Brick
19Huawei and the Technology Cold War
8Part Two
20The Sky Joins the Network
91G: The Telephone Leaves Home
21The Network and Power
102G: The World Goes Digital
22Appendix
113G: The Internet in Your Pocket (Almost)
23Endnote
12The Phone That Changed Everything