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In less time than it takes rescue teams to save victims from life-threatening disasters, commercial engineers can deploy a communications network to fulfill operational needs in a crisis. The networks allow disaster relief organizations, commercial entities or the military to establish a communications chain in remote or devastated areas around the world and link decision makers to emergency response crews or operations commanders to field units. One telephone call to an operations center alerts a team of industry technicians who are immediately on their way to an incident site and can establish a communications network within an hour of their arrival.

A telecommunications company is seeking to lead the United Kingdom's Ministry of Defence into the information age with its own information technology experience. Beginning with converting the British military's communications system to a commercial enterprise, the company is extending its menu of services and systems to fit a governmentwide approach to information access.

The same wires that carry voice transmissions to individual telephones within an organization are now delivering data, television-quality video and stereo-quality sound directly to the desktop. This allows businesses and agencies to provide multipoint videoconferencing, video-broadcast and video-on-demand capabilities to employees without installing additional infrastructures or overloading existing information technology components or networks.

Military units and law enforcement personnel are employing the latest in integrated technology and real-time video transmission to conduct operations ranging from narcotics trafficking interdiction to search and rescue efforts. These mature yet evolving systems, used for several years to monitor the jungles of South America, are wending their way to new applications on the streets of Washington, D.C.

Unity and simplicity are moving to the Pentagon. After more than 50 years of accumulating individual communications technologies to meet information distribution needs, the military headquarters is following the lead of its individual services and is well on its way, on time and on budget, to creating a joint and integrated information technology system.

The solution for providing bandwidth on demand may be for telecommunications providers to imitate electric companies. Treating bandwidth as a utility is an approach that one major telecommunications provider believes could be the communications wave of the future. By ordering bandwidth as needed via a new communications system, users could extend or cut back their capabilities and pay only for what they use. For the military, which often needs to increase capabilities during an exercise, the technology allows this increase in use without installation of additional or bigger lines that could stand unused most of the time.

The advent of increasingly sophisticated threat organizations as well as the need to interoperate with technologically mature militaries are impelling many nations to acquire highly capable communications systems that are available from only a few sources. One system, the PRC2100V Spectre V, is the latest in a series of tactical voice and data communications systems and was designed primarily for use by countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America as well as in emerging markets in Central and Eastern Europe.

The plethora of satellite communications options now available to ground-based users has induced one company to offer its customers a wide range of products and capabilities. This market-driven strategy addresses a growing trend in which satellite users face an expanding and confusing variety of services and providers.

One regional Bell operating company is introducing advanced telecommunications to rural communities to help people in remote locations realize the potential benefits of technology. The company provides wireline, wireless and connectivity solutions to businesses, federal agencies and military organizations both inside and outside of its 14-state region, which covers areas within the midwestern and western United States. The firm also works with many federal agencies, including the General Services Administration, the Department of the Treasury, the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Energy, to provide voice, data and video equipment, and solutions.

Technology advances have transformed a longstanding U.S. Army radio system into a new device that barely resembles its progenitor. Features such as position location and tactical internet access promise to change the way Army forces operate on the battlefield, and other improvements in the pipeline may change the nature of the communication system.