Every day we are amazed by news of spectacular advances: autonomous taxis transporting passengers without drivers, robot-assisted surgeries performed thousands of miles away, drones delivering orders in minutes, or digital assistants providing us with information instantly on our mobile phones.
We live surrounded by technology that works with almost magical ease. But there is a key, silent, and invisible piece without which all of this would cease to exist immediately: the internet.
And I'm not talking about your "home WiFi connection," but rather the gigantic, redundant, synchronized, and ultra-resilient global infrastructure that underpins the entire digital society.
Most people take it for granted that the internet "is simply there" and never fails. Until one day a blackout leaves a neighborhood without power for a few hours… and suddenly everything stops. Mobile phones lose signal, websites fail to load, ATMs malfunction, online shopping disappears, and that entire sense of technological stability crumbles like a house of cards.
It is then that we understand something obvious: technology doesn't float in the air; it needs physical foundations.
Energy and communications: two equally fragile pillars. We all intuitively understand the importance of electricity. We see the cables, we know that energy is transported, and we assume that something can fail because it is physical, tangible.
But digital communication, although it may seem ethereal, is just as physical and even more complex.
A large part of data traffic travels via radio frequencies, yes, but also through thousands of kilometers of fiber optic cable buried beneath cities, oceans, highways, and deserts. Added to this are towers, antennas, satellites, routers, repeaters, and data centers that cooperate in perfect synchronization so that a message reaches its destination in milliseconds.
None of this is magic. It's pure engineering, underpinned by protocols designed with surgical precision so that a global network can function as a single unit.
The internet is the greatest technological project of all time. It doesn't belong to any particular company or country. It's a network of networks, interconnected, resilient, and designed to keep functioning even when entire parts fail.
This robustness enables the technologies we now take for granted:
. Self-driving cars that require a constant connection.
. Industrial robots synchronized with cloud platforms.
. Drones that rely on GPS, sensors, and real-time data.
. Smartphones that manage thousands of online transactions every day.
. AI platforms that process information in remote data centers.
Without a reliable internet, none of these systems could operate. Modern society, from healthcare to global logistics, is bound together by an invisible thread: connectivity.
And the most exciting thing is that this is just the beginning. We are entering the decade of the Internet of Things (IoT). Billions of devices—sensors, cars, appliances, robots, surveillance systems, electricity meters, industrial machines—will be interconnected, continuously sending data.
This will demand even more reliable, faster, and more secure networks. Technologies like advanced 5G, next-generation fiber optics, experimental quantum networks, and low-Earth orbit satellites like Starlink point in that direction.
Sometimes it's worth pausing for a moment and recognizing how incredibly fortunate we are. Those of us who have lived through a few decades know how unthinkable all of this was in our childhood. Today, we carry in our pockets a device more powerful than the computers that put humans on the moon.
And this revolution would not have been possible without the quiet, constant work of thousands of engineers and technicians:
. IEEE professionals, network experts, researchers, protocol developers, hardware designers, data center managers, and more.
. People who work on open standards to make technology compatible, secure, and scalable.
Thanks to them, today we travel, work, shop, study, and communicate in a society that operates at millisecond speed.
Today I thank them for it.
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