The ITU: building the backbone for the world’s online needs

Today there is more data transported over the Internet than could be imagined just a few years ago. Mobile broadband and the proliferation of tablet and smartphone devices, driven by social media and multimedia content, continue to see unprecedented demand for capacity and coverage.

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) is one of the key standards bodies that ensures that there are common platforms, standards and interfaces to ensure that Internet growth is not encumbered by incompatibility. On today’s Internet, 95% of traffic is carried over optical networks based on ITU standards, while broadband access is heading towards gigabit speeds thanks to technology developed by our members. But it’s not just infrastructure: ITU standards have also been instrumental in the growth of video streaming  VoIP and ecommerce.

Futurity created the below infographic to illustrate the scale on which the ITU works and how its initiatives and standards power today’s World Wide Web. Pretty impressive isn’t it?