Contractors should familiarise themselves with mobile VoIP if they have not yet, one expert has said.

Norm Bogen, vice-president of digital entertainment research at In-Stat, has said that the industry is growing rapidly, with VoIP set to be embraced by more companies over the next few years.

"Consumer VoIP is still mostly analogue telephone adapters or residential gateways [home networking devices] connected to traditional time-division multiplexing phones," he said.

Meanwhile, worldwide sales of internet protocol phones increased pace in 2010, with In-Stat research predicting that IP phone shipments will exceed 40 million in 2015.

This comes after Denis McCauley, director of global technology research at the Economist Intelligence Unit, said that while there are reasons to be proud of some areas of the UK's digital development, others lag behind the rest of Europe.