The International Telecommunications Union, or ITU, which is an agency within the United Nations that is focused on Internet

Things, put out a press release in early December 2018, announcing that for the first time

ever, more than half the world's population, will be using the Internet by the end of 2018,

an estimated 51.2%. 51.2% represents about 3.9 billion people worldwide, and 90% of that 3.9 billion people have access

to 3G or higher speed networks, which is good, but not great. For context, 3G was in vogue here in the United States.

Back in the early smartphone days of 2007,

the iPhone was infamous for being a late adopter in this regard, actually,

releasing their iPhone 3G in 2008,

about a year after many Android phones already had 3G capabilities.

But the point here is that 3G allows folks to do very basic mobile internet things,

but it doesn't fully integrate those who are on it, who are using such speeds, which

is practically capped at around 384 kilobytes per second,

in most real-world situations using the most basic version of the 3G standard, to tap into

the modern internet, which has been and is being built to serve those with higher speed access.

Try to load a modern website or app on an outdated connection,

and you'll see what I'm talking about, as you wait the better part of a minute for the homepage to

load all of the graphics and scripts, that those with higher speed access can download in just a few

seconds. The positive here, though, is that an internet connection of any kind is available

for that many people. In many places around the world, the infrastructure is technically there,

but the access is still out of reach for the majority of the local population. So over half is still

pretty good. But even though 96% of the global human population lives within range

of some kind of internet signal, a lot of people within range of those signals are not able

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