Those who travel often know well the importance of staying connected with family, friends, and colleagues. Despite the sometimes annoying omnipresent demand on us to respond immediately to calls, email, and SMS — there is indeed a sense of comfort through being interconnected with the knowledge that remote contact is only a few keystrokes away. This need is heightened when we are traveling and especially when such travel involves long distances and may take us to remote locations.

Despite the seemingly pervasiveness of networking, there is still a significant portion of the planet where the ability to easily connect a phone or computer is a pleasant surprise. In many other places, it is not possible without bringing your network with you. More and more we are finding ourselves in these locations for work or for pleasure. For most working people today, NOT being connected is a huge detriment to their productivity and when they travel to locations where connectivity is not available, they must bring their network with them. Thanks to advances in mobile broadband technologies, this is now an easy matter to address.

Portable communications systems are readily available at reasonable cost from any number of service providers for connecting from anywhere on the planet at anytime.  OODAkits are one example of self-contained mobile broadband communication kits that support five to ten concurrent users making phones calls, accessing the Web, and transmitting live video. Iridium satphones are examples of single-user telephones that work nearly everywhere on the planet as long as you are willing to use the phone when you have a clear line-of-site to the sky.

If you depend on connectivity for your work, consider taking your network with you for those critical missions where you must, without fail, make connections, talk with others, and get online.

Communication equipment for emergencies, disaster response, and humanitarian aid MUST be portable to be truly effective (and water MUST be potable). You never know where the next disaster will strike (although we have a good idea of where the real dung will hit the fan when they do).

Pre-positioning communications assets is a reasonable strategy (hope for help isn’t) when resource constraints aren’t a big concern — but when will that ever be the case? Consider portable communications systems for those times you don’t want to think about. They can be easily kept ready and quickly transported to wherever they are needed.

Be sure the portable systems you consider include capabilities for multiple people to coordinate locally (among each other on scene) as well as remotely (connect to help and resources out of the immediate area) using voice, data, and video communications tools… and DON’T FORGET ABOUT POWER!