At the beginning of the 1990s, 2.4 Kbps was considered an OK data rate. Today, Google Fiber offers consumers 2 Gbps broadband access – 1.2 million times faster. But over the period of time that speeds were increasing, communications standards were seeing an inversely proportional decline in their power.
The reason is the arrival of cloud networking, which combines high-speed networks (defined by rigid networking standards) and applications (which are not). Without an over-arching standards blueprint, cloud service providers have done their own thing, building their clouds using different approaches. This causes problems with interoperability and vendor lock-in.
On the other hand, it’s questionable whether the current cloud revolution would have happened at all if the industry had tried to standardize it from the get-go. Out of the cloud chaos has come incredible innovation, delivering huge benefits for enterprise companies that use cloud services.
The chart above shows the growth in global average Internet speed from 1992 to 2022 on a logarithmic scale. It’s plotted against the decline in the influence of communications standards, assessed by Silverlinings, using an intentionally opaque, apples-to-oranges qualitative methodology inspired by Gartner.
(We’ve measured the drop-off using the percentage of “something-or-other” metric first implemented in Marvel movies, where science stuff is always quantified as a percentage, but the “of what” is never explained).
Note how the lines cross in 2017. That’s when the telecom industry made a proper bollocks of network functions virtualization, and then woke up to the fact that what had worked for them for 150 years (standards and lots of them) wasn’t going to automatically carry them through the 21st century of cloud networks and beyond.
It’s also the year Trump was inaugurated. Coincidence? Probably.
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