- It's easy to take our telecommunications for granted.
After all, for all of my life, telephones have existed,
and dialing a friend or family member
thousands of miles away has being a normal activity.
It never seemed unusual or special.
For the people who saw telephones emerge,
it may have at first appeared magical.
As telephones and then data transmission
became more commonplace,
our notion of distance and time changed.
Communicating almost anywhere
in the globe became instantaneous.
Even today, it's still worth acknowledging
this remarkable human achievement.
Telephones, telegraphs, faxes, and early data transmission
would of course only be a tease
at what was to come in the communication space
in the second half of the 20th century.
Back in the 1960s, the US Department of Defense
awarded research contracts to a number of organizations
to develop advanced packet switching.
Packet switching, which sounds complex,
is the idea of taking data,
breaking it into parts or logical packages,
and then sending them over a network.
Each packet can take separate paths
depending on what is most optimal,
but they are then reassembled at the destination
as a single unit again.
It's an important idea because data can be transmitted
without the need to rely on just one path.
Without packet switching, if a path is broken or congested,
then data flow is impacted.
Packet switching dramatically improves reliability
and builds redundancy into a network.
Packet switching-networks
used multiple communications protocols,
a set of rules for data exchange,
but one particular implementation, called ARPANET,
eventually standardized on what was called
the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, TCP/IP.
This protocol was used by
a National Science Foundation-funded effort
to connect supercomputer sites
at universities across the US.
That network was open to commercial access around 1989.
And voila, (chuckles) the Internet was born.
While the Internet provided
a standard communication protocol, TCP/IP,
for data to traverse across disparate networks,
additional value was added
with the emergence of a new standard
to link documents together across those networks.
This weave of linked files would become known
as the World Wide Web.
Other Internet-enabled capabilities, such as email
and File Transfer Protocol, or FTP, also prospered.
Today, over half the planet engages on the Internet
in a wide variety of connected activities,
and millions of businesses run entirely on it.
Mobile devices, smartphones in particular,
have enabled billions of people to have access
to information and services at any moment.
According to research by Adobe in 2017,
popular activities performed on a smartphone include
70% of people use them for email,
65% for social media,
59% for watching videos,
58% for research,
45% for shopping,
and 41% for games.
As devices continue improving to store more information,
have faster processors, better screens,
and connect to faster networks, new innovation will emerge.
Soon, we'll experience a new generation
of cellular technology, a fifth generation,
better known as 5G, that has the potential
to magnify the opportunities for innovation.
Conceivably, in time, all devices and people
will have access to blazingly fast wireless connectivity,
but this connectivity isn't just restricted
to people connecting to services.
We're now seeing devices connect
to other devices over the Internet,
a quickly emerging space called the Internet of Things.
All sorts of home devices,
from thermostats to digital assistants,
refrigerators, speakers, cameras, and doorbells
now connect to the Internet,
enabling them to gather and report information
and to be controllable wirelessly.
Machines and robots in factories,
in what is called the Industrial Internet,
are also being connected in record numbers.
Current estimates suggest that over 50 billion things
will be connected to the Internet by 2020.
By most measures,
global connectivity has been a plus for humanity.
However, in connecting so many people,
machines, and organizations,
we've created enormous dependencies.
A major outage cannot only sever communications
but also disrupt critical supply chains.
In addition, growing connectivity
also means more attack vectors,
that is, places where bad actors, such as terrorists,
can cause damage and harm.
The need for defense mechanisms has grown,
and cybersecurity must now be a high priority
for all of us and our organizations.
We are now a connected species,
humans connected to humans,
humans to machines,
and machines to machines,
but we're still just at the very beginning.
As almost four billion people
are still not connected to the Internet,
the real promise of a connected planet
has yet to be realized.
It will happen in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.