Sometimes, it’s just so easy to forget just how far and how fast the world has come when it comes to connectivity. The idea of a browser for that strange Internet thing only techies used, the World Wide Web itself will be 35 years old this year (its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, working in SNS’s home of Switzerland at CERN, only opened up the first homepage built in it in 1990)—and last year the number of Internet users reached 5.35 billion people, or nearly 70% of the planet’s population.
We wonder what Mr Berners-Lee might think of the fact that as of the end of 2023, there were 1.13 billion websites in the world… of which 82% were inactive! In any case, global connectivity matters to everyone now: and given that the first words you will see on our home page is that SNS is all about the delivery of agile, high-performance global connectivity for operators, service providers and enterprises, where both the market and indeed our global digital society is going is a matter of the utmost importance to Swiss Networking Solutions.
That’s as true for our enterprise customers as it is for our many MVNO partners and clients. So, what might 2025 bring us in terms of the further reach of this genuinely amazing way of sharing information with one another, be it for business or pleasure?
- 35 years on, a lot of us have still never been online According to the ITU, while an estimated 68 per cent of the global population is now online and all indicators tracked in the report show improvement, a stubborn digital divide persists and at least a third of the world's people remain offline. In high-income countries, 93% of the population is estimated to be using the Internet in 2024; in low-income countries, more like 27% of the population is estimated to be online.
- Have we reached some kind of natural limit here? Given that the most common way for people to cruise what we used to call the Information Superhighway is via their phones (6%) but smartphone sales may have plateaued out, there’s a real question mark about how much these figures can change… yet as governments see the core place in the Internet in the economy and lives of their citizens, we will continue to see investment in universal broadband and a constant search for new partners and experts to close these gaps.
- Will we have to accept a less open common digital market square? Trump 2.0 and rising conflict with China, brought into recent high visibility with DeepSeek’s possible ‘Sputnik moment’ for the US tech industry, could usher in more restrictions about what can be accessed online in certain parts of the world or times of political crisis, giving rise to a sense of control that seems increasingly far from the original libertarian vision of Berners-Lee and the heady days of Netscape Navigator.
- As good global digital citizens, we can’t ignore these issues. But there’s much more cause for optimism if we stick to the commercial side of the Web, which is what the majority of people want our expertise to come to us for anyway. Commentators estimate to work satisfactorily online 5-40 Mbps is the minimum, which makes users in Qatar, currently rated the best connected country in the world, at an average of 286 Mbps looking pretty comfortable.
- This need for speed (and bandwidth) will continue to drive demand for more and more networks in the private sector—which (though the trend may be reversing somewhat) has to be able to provide adequate safe broadband access for all those folks continuing to work in a hybrid fashion, which may be over half of all American full-time workers and is so popular a trend in Europe it’s driving down demand for office space.
- But we will want more business Internet for more than checking our mail or those fun back-to-back Zoom calls; expect a flood of demand in 2025 for robust enterprise cloud applications that will need greater than public Internet level delivery QoS, with analyst group Gartner predicting worldwide IT spending to grow by 9.3% in 2025 and is set to hit $7 trillion in 2028, driven by (no surprise?) demand for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other advanced tech that will want to send and receive data back at high speed and large quantities out of the clouds they now store 60%-plus of their data.
- The just-concluded 2025 Davos meeting certainly agreed. And if we probably won’t see a Metaverse, we will see substantial implementation at last of 5G in the wild—as things like private networks and network slicing come into their own, led by manufacturers, entertainment, media and gaming companies who, from mixed reality in the factory to augmented concert or sporting experiences will all be vying to provide users the most immersive, rich and responsive connected events they ca
That’s just a glimpse of some of the exciting things that 2025 could be bringing in terms of rising global connectivity. So, from supporting the rollout of business networks to supporting your clients turn their AI ambitions into services people will pay for to seeing how the latest standard in data and voice transmissions could help your use cases, SNS might have just the right idea, service or product to help.
That’s because we specialise in private global connectivity, linking networks to cloud services, operators to partners, and enterprises via secure connections – anywhere. Our team builds out the specialised fabric you need to differentiate services and gain performance that surpasses that from public internet connections.
Intrigued? Connect with us today and see.
