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Our thanks to all the technology professionals who shared their views in celebration of the 160th anniversary of the International Telecommunications Union (17th May). We were overwhelmed by the interest and volume of responses. For readability, we have included a wider selection of responses here.
For most of its 160-year history, the International Telecommunication Union has dealt with the kind of problems that only become visible when they stop working. Standards. Spectrum. Interoperability. The invisible plumbing of global communication. Not particularly glamorous right up until a cable is cut, a network fragments, or two systems suddenly can’t speak to each other.
That feels especially relevant in 2026. Because despite all the talk of AI revolutions, sovereign clouds, quantum threats and digital transformation, many of the biggest technology questions today are still fundamentally coordination problems. How do you secure global infrastructure without breaking openness? How do you govern AI that moves faster than regulation? And is the internet still becoming more connected or simply more complicated?
The responses below reflect that tension. Some contributors look back to the telegraph cable, the telephone, or the standards that made the internet possible in the first place. Others focus on what comes next: AI governance, post-quantum security, network APIs, digital identity, and an increasingly fragmented online world. But across all of them sits the same underlying idea: connectivity was never just about technology. It was always about getting the world to agree on how technology should work together.
Related reading: What it takes to deliver cybersecurity to governments and telcos
The most important global connectivity milestone over the past 160 years is the successful laying of the first transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, because it fundamentally reshaped how the world communicates and still underpins today’s digital infrastructure. By shrinking transatlantic message delivery from weeks to minutes, it marked the true beginning of real-time global communication and set the foundation for everything that followed. Despite the prominence of newer technologies like satellite networks, about 95% of international data still travels through undersea cables, carrying an estimated $10 trillion in daily trade, which highlights how enduring this infrastructure is.
Yet, recent suspected sabotage incidents in regions like the Baltic Sea and near Taiwan, along with initiatives such as NATO’s Baltic Sentry mission launched in 2025, reveal how vulnerable these cables remain. More than a century and a half later, the coordination challenges that led to the creation of the International Telecommunication Union persist, and the lack of a unified international framework to protect undersea cables underscores just how critical this original milestone continues to be.
Not a cable, not a satellite, not even the internet itself, but interoperability through standards. Even in my own comparatively short 30 years in the industry, I’ve lived fragmentation first-hand: TCP/IP alongside IPX/SPX, DEC LAT and Banyan VINES, Token Ring and Ethernet in the same estate. It all worked, right up until you needed it to work together.
Every gateway and translation layer was an operational tax: more complexity, more brittleness, more 2am failures that nobody had budgeted for. The ITU’s early push for cross-border consistency was the first serious attempt to solve that at scale, and the eventual global convergence on IP made it real. Neither was glamorous, neither introduced anything new to marvel at, but both were essential.
And for anyone working in Operational Technology, the challenge is far from resolved. Infrastructure makes connection possible. Standards make it usable at scale. That distinction matters more than most people realise, and we’ve spent 160 years proving it.
If you strip away the noise, and focus on what truly shifted the trajectory of human progress, it’s the invention of the telephone: the moment we moved from delayed, fragmented communication to the instant transfer of human voice across distance. That single leap collapsed time, accelerated decision-making, deepened relationships, and enabled business, diplomacy, and innovation to operate at a pace previously unimaginable. Letters informed, the telegraph signalled, but the telephone connected directly, emotionally, and immediately. It turned the world from a series of isolated pockets into a responsive, living network, and every advancement since, from mobile to digital data, stands on that fundamental breakthrough: the ability to speak, be heard, and act in real time, no matter where you are.
No organisation, no matter how established, is going to figure out the pace of technological change alone. That’s true even for the tools that have been around for decades. Application-to-Person (A2P) messaging is a good example. It still needs regular upkeep and, sometimes, a full rebuild of how messages are delivered to keep pace with how businesses and consumers communicate. When you layer in more intelligent messaging channels and new authentication demands, that challenge multiplies.
The reality is that the institutions and frameworks governing global connectivity were built for a different time. They’re still useful, but they weren’t built to move at the speed the market demands. No single company, regardless of size, can close that gap by itself. Innovation is happening across so many different business and technological fronts at once that the only way to access the best ideas is through the right partnerships.
What will truly drive progress is organisations with different strengths, like carriers, enterprises, and technology platforms, working together. That’s where the real acceleration happens, and that’s how you define what a truly connected world will look like.
No, not yet. The biggest concern I see is the rate at which AI is advancing. The fact that these tools are widely available, combined with a volatile geopolitical environment, means technological change is exposing global institutions to more risk than ever before, and making risk harder to keep up with. The pace of threat from financial crime in particular is outrunning the institutions designed to govern it.
The way financial institutions screen risky individuals and organisations needs to get much smarter. There needs to be a big shift to continuous, dynamic screening, instead of relying on manual searching, to fight the rise of financial crime and its impact on businesses and the wider global economy.
AI, easily. The other emerging tech on people’s lists (climate tech, biotech, quantum) all need coordination eventually. AI needs it now because of the pace of its progression. Most emerging tech moves at the pace of physical infrastructure or peer reviewed papers. AI capabilities ship in weeks and propagate in days. By the time any international body finishes a working group on AI safety, the model class they were studying is generations out of date. The closest playbook for this is probably nuclear non-proliferation, not telecoms standards. The hard part is that AI doesn’t need uranium or a physical supply chain to spread. The real control points are compute and talent, and most governments don’t own either of them.
Mit Patel, Founder and CEO at Assurix
The internet is becoming more fragmented, not less but not in the way people expected. It is not just about firewalls or national borders, it is about control over data, infrastructure, and enforcement. Governments and organisations increasingly want visibility and policy enforcement within their own environments, driven by privacy, compliance, and resilience concerns. Even as AI accelerates innovation and connectivity, it also amplifies these concerns, raising new questions around where data is processed, who controls it, and how it is governed.
What is emerging is a more “locally governed” global internet where connectivity still spans the world, but trust, inspection, and control are pushed closer to where users and applications actually operate. The architectures that succeed will be the ones that can operate globally without requiring centralized control, adapting to fragmentation without breaking connectivity.
Asha Kalyur, VP Marketing with Zenarmor
Successful global connectivity in 2035 will be driven by hybrid, integrated unified communications that provide organisations with the flexibility to connect and collaborate in ways that best meet their operational needs. This will rely on adaptable deployment models spanning public and private cloud, edge computing, and on-premises environments.
Businesses will increasingly seek to modernise their communications infrastructure without compromising security, resilience, or operational control, while ensuring seamless integration into workflows and business applications.
I believe the future of connectivity will be inherently interoperable and flexible by design, enabling organisations to adopt innovations such as AI-powered capabilities in their terms, while supporting increasingly distributed workforces and mission-critical operations.
We can also expect truly seamless roaming across communication modalities. While the concept itself is not new, users will increasingly demand a consistent, uninterrupted experience as they move between locations, devices and collaboration environments, ensuring reliable communication at the point of activity, in every situation.
Ultimately, the objective is not to establish a one-size-fits-all communications model, but to enable seamless, secure, and adaptive collaboration tailored to the specific needs of every user and environment.
Mark Duff, VP at Mitel
