Few sectors have undergone as much radical change as the communications sector in the last 10 years. For much of the world, communications began this period as the domain of state-owned monopolies and is now represented by liberalised markets in which hundreds of companies compete to offer customers a wide variety of services. At the beginning of that period, communications was dominated by fixed voice communications.
Now mobile communications and data communications dwarf the revenues from fixed voice communications. Communications has grown in importance and affects every aspect of peoples’ lives both personally and professionally. It has also grown in scope, overlapping much more with the worlds of IT and with broadcasting media with the emergence of digital content. The sector globally has also grown steadily with a CAGR of 5.7% between 2001 and 2005 (a period of great turbulence for the industry following the telecoms crash of 2000).