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Back in 1988 when the average price of gasoline was $1.12 a gallon, the U.S. government was selling long-distance telephone service to federal agencies for about 28 cents a minute. Over the past 18 years, however, while the cost of a gallon of gasoline has more than doubled, that same long-distance minute now costs slightly more than a penny. To enable federal agencies to take advantage of today's falling prices and rising technology, the U.S. General Services Administration later this year will award two contracts that will serve as the primary replacement for the expiring Federal Technology Service (FTS) 2001 and FTS2001 Crossover contracts.

A new high-power commercial X-band communications satellite, designed to meet growing bandwidth demands, will help satiate the U.S. military's voracious appetite for space-based connections. Rapidly increasing satellite communications requirements are expected to continue outstripping government-owned satellite capacity for the foreseeable future.

An advanced microelectronics technology may allow future communications equipment to receive and process multiple high frequency waveforms easily. Relying on superconducting processors in a sealed refrigerated container, the system translates analog radio signals directly to digital information, preventing the data and efficiency losses found in semiconductor-based applications. Unconstrained by performance-limiting issues such as thermal interference, the frigid superconducting chips permit prototype devices to receive, sample and transmit gigahertz-range signals across much of the military's spectrum.

The Advanced Extremely High Frequency satellite is designed for point-on-demand instant communications, providing protected worldwide command and control access within fractions of a second to U.S. and allied warfighters. This spacecraft is taking shape with substantial technical improvements-new phased array antennas, advanced integrated circuits, more efficient waveforms and novel space-based thrusters.

Members of the joint community are moving forward on proving that voice over Internet protocol can be a force multiplier. Although voice over Internet protocol is still in relative infancy, the Joint Communications Support Element, U.S. Joint Forces Command, has demonstrated through a series of exercises that this approach can increase both technological advances and bandwidth efficiency provided to the joint warfighter. It also decreases airlift requirements, reduces the number of needed personnel and cuts the cost of communications systems by moving from circuit-based to Internet-based networks.

A unique flying antenna testbed plays a significant role in the development and integration of battlefield information networks and communications nodes. Moreover, this aircraft's primary function is to support airborne communications transition to production and fusion into new command and control networks.

U.S. Joint Forces Command is harnessing the power of extensible markup language to lash together three capabilities and to facilitate collaboration between intelligence and operations activities. If successful, the integrated capability would increase an individual warfighter's ability to control intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets and share targeting information, reducing the time between target identification and strike from minutes to seconds. Integration of those capabilities is in the experimental stage, but the project's director is encouraged by the initial results and believes it could eventually lead to humans on instead of in the targeting-strike loop.

With updated cabling and server farms in place, the U.S. Navy is making way on a government-owned, government-operated information technology initiative that ultimately will affect more than 41,000 users in Europe, the Middle East and the Far East. During the coming months, sailors stationed at bases outside the continental United States, beyond the scope of the Navy/Marine Corps Intranet, will be coming aboard their own enterprisewide network.

A prototype over-the-horizon communications system and an on-the-move command post that allows commanders to conduct fully mobile operations could help the U.S. Marine Corps maintain connectivity and situational awareness on the battlefield. Developed by the U.S. Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory in Quantico, Virginia, both systems support the service's doctrine of ship-to-objective maneuver, which calls for the rapid deployment of troops and equipment from the seat to staging areas deep inside enemy territory.

Networking capabilities that increase situational awareness are moving down the chain of command and eliminating bottlenecks in data sharing. Work underway on the Pathfinder advanced concept technology demonstration aims at integrating capabilities so that information gathered by unmanned ground vehicles, unmanned aerial vehicles and unattended ground sensors can be distributed within a mobile, self-forming, self-healing network. The system is designed for use by special operations and lightweight conventional forces in small team operations.