Chapter 7 Summary

        This chapter provided context for the existence of 3G, 4G, and 5G as terms I heard growing up as well as more recently. I had no idea that the ‘G’ stood for ‘generation,’ and I had hardly a clue why everybody seemed to care about it. I also remember some conspiracy theories from a few years ago about 5G signals causing covid-19 and whatnot. Just wait until the people who believed that find out that the sun hits their skin with many orders of magnitude more energy in radiation than 5G ever could. The age of this book truly shows, as it is written before 5G was adopted, reading speculatively on it. It’s very interesting to me that one difference between these wireless networks is frequency, and that all of this information freely floating in the ether is just energy being radiated through the walls of buildings, our bodies, through clouds, etc. Science is amazing. 

        I also had no idea that cities have their own communal Wi-Fi networks. I live under a rock, naturally, so I’m normally not exposed to cities. The existence of MiFi is another aspect of this reading I found applicable to my life, as I have been considering living in a van and becoming nomadic. The question of how I will stay connected to the internet was an issue for me to work out. I considered using mobile hotspot, but the service from my phone is not great. I had even googled in recent months how to buy wireless bandwidth directly from my phone service provider, and I’m surprised that MiFi systems were not included in my list of hits. This reading has also brought to my attention that my current workplace (ID Logistics in White Haven) uses a wireless mesh network to distribute warehouse management system access to employees throughout the building. I only realized this because I remembered issues with connectivity that happened early on when the building first started operations, and their IT department had to service and install more access points throughout the building to rectify this. It’s very satisfying to begin actually understanding these things.