Yeeeehawwww!

Free WiFi in the hotel room in Cheyenne!

Which reminds me: I have been reading the lessons learned reports from OIF, and one of the concerns is that the increased use of UAVs is congesting all of the satellites, to the point that DoD cannot deploy many more UAVs without hitting the capacity limit. Combine this with the desire to expand the use of Blue Force Tracker and Iridium satellite phones, and we'll be at or past the limit of available secure bandwidth in that theater.

The demand for bandwidth right down to the individual rifleman, loggie, firedog, or dirtboy is growing, so the congestion will only get worse.

We're going to have to move more of our wireless comms off the satellites, but to what? Well, how about developing a concentrator on a UAV, so it can be piloted in an orbit tastefully stood-off from a headquarters area, and let it route the calls either back to the ground or up to the bird? An unmanned airborne cell tower. Embed the security into the clients---the phones, pagers, PDAs---so the UAV is not a gigantic classified COMSEC item that must be recovered if it crashes or is shot down.