There is probably not a clearest and most recent example of the impact that technological development can have in everyday life than that represented by the emergence of personal computers and the development of the Internet. They have changed our way of living in multiple ways and, essentially, our way of communicating.

This technological revolution has been responsible for a sharp jump in productivity sustained by many experts in the economies of developed countries and for offering the hope of promoting growth in many developing countries as well as in relatively poorer ones.    

There is no doubt that computer-assisted design and process techniques have changed the way of production and have made the creation of global networks of suppliers and world value chains possible; and, although some people consider that nowadays these technologies are close to reaching their maturity level, remarkable examples of new developments that they can provide, modifying the characteristics and scopes of businesses so traditional as that of telephony, appear periodically.

Indeed, the development of communication technologies, under the so-called "voice-over-internet-protocol" (VOIP) mode, is revolutionizing this activity with the emergence of recent markets, products and companies that, until some years ago, did not even dream about challenging the traditional telephony services or even cellular telephony.