5G is in the air. It is about to land at Rock in Rio

Turn on a tap, and water comes out. Call someone, and the phone rings. These are everyday trivialities, so commonplace that we even forget they exist. This degree of ordinariness bears no relation to their importance. Before it reaches your home, water travels through a complex distribution system — practically invisible, yet critical to our lives. And when you open ECO or refresh Instagram, the information travels in thousandths of a second from your phone to the server, or vice versa.

They are two very different infrastructures, but they have one thing in common: while they work, we rarely hear about them. But when the water does not come out, or the phone does not ring, nobody can remain indifferent. As if the pandemic had not been enough, at the start of the year the Portuguese were reminded once again of how central telecommunications are to the functioning of society and the economy: on 7 February, a cyberattack on Vodafone brought down the operator’s networks for several days. At least four million Portuguese are believed to have been left without service.