Cellular standards are very warped in my brain due to both the marketing devices around them and the public conspiracies related to the rollout of 5G.

From a marketing perspective, I’ve always assumed LTE was some type of additional modifier that also applied to 5G and indicated the fastest possible speeds. I realize that this is purely misinformation and an assumption I made, but this also made me reflect on where I have heard about cellular standards before this class: Telecommunications and phone stores, under the context of commerce.

I am curious at what point does our cellular connection reach a speed where the average person wont be able to be sold on an upgraded network plan with the most modern cellular standard if the speed is not noticeably better. I know there is a lot more that each standard brings to the table than speed, but that is the one people really care about (as stated in the reading as well).

I am also fascinated by the conspiracies surrounding 5G and the huge amount of public distrust it had initially. The public rollout of 5G coincided with covid-era 2020 and was infused with conspiracies ranging from 5G creating the pandemic to rumors that the newly rollout RNA vaccines had 5G microchips for population control. Generally, I believe a healthy amount of skepticism about emerging technology is a positive thing, these ideas were obviously baseless and extreme.

These two points bring me to the question that this week’s reading had me thinking about: Who’s job is the public messaging about new cellular standards?

From what I can tell, most of the onus falls onto telecommunication companies due to a new standard fitting well into a sales pitch. From some research it seems like an organization called the GSMA also has a role of driving public-facing narratives for emerging standards, but it does not seem like this would filter down to the level of base consumers (everyday people). Maybe it seems a bit optimistic, but what if there was an independent organization who’s job it was to do wide messaging for what a new cellular standard means, shows the science behind it and all of the testing in a digestible form for a wide audience?

nginx logs for noahdorazio.com

I used Chat GPT to parse my data for me and output a spreadsheet document. To me, it seems like very few of the requests found in the logs are genuine browser hits, but rather automated trawlers. I think this because in some of the timing breakdowns, there are quick repeated requests from the same IP, this type of behavior points to a bot. From there, I asked ChatGPT to help me write a whois command to batch analyze my top 10 IP’s:

for ip in 124.198.131.83 212.102.44.89 165.22.248.160 139.59.246.240 43.157.240.171 143.110.217.244 138.68.144.227 165.227.84.14 165.22.235.3 78.153.140.149; do
  echo "===== $ip ====="
  whois $ip | egrep -i "OrgName|Organization|netname|descr" | head -n 5
  echo
done

A lot of the orgs are digital ocean, which also leads me to believe that these are bots trawling the web to update registries and such.