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(Updated: December 21, 2014) In April last year, US president Obama told some fundraisers that he was disappointed by the communications equipment he found in the White House: "I always thought I was gonna have like really cool phones and stuff," he said during a Q&A session with contributors at a fund-raising meeting in Chicago on April 14, 2011. "We can't get our phones to work." Acting out his exasperation, he said: "Come on, guys. I'm the president of the United States! Where's the fancy buttons and stuff and the big screen comes up? It doesn't happen." Obama made these remarks after the press pool had left and may not have realized some reporters back at the White House could still hear his comments. The president was probably responding to a question about bottlenecks in technological innovation and he used his White House experience as an example. A lot of people would probably like to believe these remarks of the presiden...

As the first post of this weblog about top level telecommunications we start with a nice video about the White House Situation Room, released by the White house on December 18, 2009:   As we can see from this video, the 2006-2007 renovation transformed the Situation Room from one simple conference room with a small office space into a multi room facility with high tech communications equipment, much like we see in fictional movies and tv-series. At the same time, we also see that the Situation Room isn't the exclusive space for the president anymore. Many other government officials use the new conference rooms too for their (video conference) meetings. The Situation Room is maintained by the White House Situation Support Staff (WHSSS), which was created ca. 1985 to oversee the Situation Room and the Crisis Management Center (CMC), which was set up in 1982 in the Old Executive Office Building and acted as a "second situation room". The WHSSS is nowadays part of the Defens...