At InterDigital, we’re proud of the roles our engineers play in connecting the world around us and in our commitment to the system that has enabled so many breakthroughs in wireless, video, and AI: open and consensus-based global standards.
This week, we mark World Standards Day, and it is a good moment to step back and take the long view on how standardized technologies impact our lives. When you observe the progress of these technologies across decades, the scale of what has happened is far greater than we can easily grasp.
Just take the example of cellular and the transition from 4G in the 2010s to 5G in the 2020s. In the United States last year, according to the industry body CTIA, Americans used more wireless data than in the entirety of the previous wireless era. CTIA puts the total at 159.3 trillion megabytes, around 39 percent more than was used across the whole of the 4G decade. The same measure stood at under half a trillion megabytes in 2010.
That is an American snapshot of a worldwide story, and similar patterns are emerging in other markets. Phones are only part of it. Nearly half of the connected devices on networks today are something other than a handset, including watches that track our health, sensors that keep factories and power grids running, and cars that now resemble smartphones on wheels. In video, compression has quietly enabled so much of our lives, from the video calls that dominate our work schedules to the TV shows and movies we enjoy at the end of the day. Together, these technologies have become part of the infrastructure of modern life.
None of this happened by accident, and none of it happened alone. Underpinning every one of those connections is a global standard, a shared agreement on how devices and networks should speak to one another. Standards are the reason a phone bought in one country works in another, and the reason a generation of research becomes infrastructure that everyone can build on. These standards are often unseen, but they are essential.
At InterDigital, our engineers have contributed to writing and shaping these standards for decades, through each generation of cellular and across the major video codecs. It is patient work, measured in years rather than quarters. The long tail of research that forms a standard today may not reach a consumer's hands for another decade. We invest significantly in our research – including $1 billion over the last five years in research and portfolio development - because of our commitment to standards and to building a foundation of connected technologies that supports so much of the world economy.
This commitment also extends to our leadership of key standards development organizations (SDOs) where we hold more than 100 different leadership positions. We are one of only three companies to hold multiple chair positions of working groups within 3GPP, the SDO that leads the development of cellular wireless standards.
There is an environmental dividend in this too, which feels fitting since this year's World Standards Day spotlights clean energy. Each generation of standardized technology does more with less. Every new video codec moves the same picture using far fewer bits, and each cellular generation carries more traffic for every unit of power it draws. Efficiency at that magnitude, repeated billions of times a day, adds up to a less wasteful digital world. That is the kind of progress standards are built to deliver, and scale.
The most striking thing about how standards are made is who makes them. Consensus is critical, and engineers from companies that compete directly, and sometimes disagree sharply, must sit at the same table and agree on what comes next. That collaboration is not a soft virtue. It is the hard, practical method by which the industry's thorniest problems get solved, and it is the reason the past twenty years of progress held together rather than splintering into rival systems.
That same system is now building what comes next. The 6G cellular networks of the future will not be a clean break from 5G. Instead, they will be built upon it, generation layered on generation as it has always been. We expect 6G to be AI-native, with intelligence woven into the network itself, alongside capabilities like integrated sensing and communication that could enable networks to perceive the physical world as well as connect it. The demand for these systems is expanding, and CTIA expects data use to grow several times over by the early 2030s, with AI alone accounting for a large share of all traffic. That makes the work our engineers are already driving in 6G all the more important.
So, on World Standards Day, it is worth remembering what we are recognizing. Not a particular technology, not a single company, or even a groundbreaking contribution, but a way of working. A committed approach based on consensus, transparency, and openness that turns private research into shared progress, that has delivered some of the great consumer success stories of our time, and that will shape the decade ahead, just as it shaped the last.
The leaps only look sudden from a distance. Up close, they are the product of years of patient, collaborative invention.
