The Cormorant Communications Network is a military wide area communications network implemented by the British Army sometime around 2000.1 It has also been adopted by certain Royal Air Force units in limited deployments.
Role
The network provides end-to-end wide area communications using the same Asynchronous Transfer Mode protocol that underpins many late-20th Century civilian telecommunications networks. It supports voice traffic routed over IP (although this is distinct from Internet VoIP) and can also support IPv4 and IPv6 BTDS traffic.
Withdrawal From Service
On 10 September 2009 the MoD announced2 that the system was to be withdrawn from service in Afghanistan, and the trunk radio elements replaced with a far simpler and less secure bearer radio system from Israeli company Radwin. This reflected the significantly reduced operational requirements, with much of Cormorant's mandatory functionality being discarded in favour of a higher bandwidth radio, which in turn reflected the huge growth in data requirements since Cormorant was originally specified.