Standards play an important role in network construction.
If standards are not kept incompatibility issues will arise.
For example data that is shared in the network should be in a language that is supported by all users. Also standard and similar cables have to be used in order to have similar types of data.
International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is an organization that creates those kind of standards. For example, it has created ASCII and then changed it to Unicode so that all devices can support the use of all languages.