Online published on 15 May, 2012.
This paper gives a summary of the global evolution of telecommunications. The invention of the telephone allowed the immediate and simultaneous interconnection of many people around the world for the first time in human history. This had many benefits, including the unprecedented rates of economic growth experienced in the last century and the twentieth century may be called the “Age of the Telephone”. This article also considers some implications of an increasingly interconnected world, like faster development and knowledge creation. New mobile forms of communication in the twenty-first century are fast replacing old fixed landline telephones, bringing better, cheaper, faster and more efficient ways to communicate in our rapidly connecting planetary civilisation.
