Spc. Michelle Soto, a member of the California National Guard's 1072 PLS Company serving in Iraq, had planned to be home for her daughter's high school graduation. When she couldn't get leave, she was devastated.

Then Soto heard about video conference calls offered by Freedom Calls Foundation. It's one of several nonprofit organizations that help military people abroad connect with their families and participate in important events in their lives - births, weddings, anniversaries - even though they can't be there in person.

At first, Soto was skeptical, but she decided to give it a try. So Freedom Calls and Army staff worked with her to install the cameras, computers, and video conference equipment in Iraq. Volunteers also worked with Soto's family in the United States to set up the necessary equipment at her daughter's school.

Thanks to this technology - which was provided at no cost to her - Soto got to watch her daughter receive her diploma and to talk with her family for almost two hours afterward.

Charities, technology companies, and the armed services are working to provide families like Soto and her daughter with new communication options, ushering in a virtual revolution in the level and quality of communication between military personnel in the field and their loved ones back home.

"The state-of-the-art technology has reached a point where we can have a paradigm shift in communication," says John Harlow II, cofounder and executive director of the Freedom Calls Foundation, which opened its first facility to 12,000 soldiers at Camp Cooke in Iraq on June 14.

In previous wars, armed forces personnel serving abroad didn't always find contacting their loved ones fast or satisfying. Letters sent by mail could take weeks to arrive at their destinations, and even e-mail, which became available during the Gulf War, does not provide the same feeling of intimacy as audio or visual contact.

Access to phones has always been a challenge for soldiers in a war zone, and the cost of calls typically has been prohibitively high. In addition, war-torn countries often didn't have the infrastructure (such as accessible telephone lines) to support technology, says Glenn Sparks, professor of communications at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind.

Organizations such as Freedom Calls are working to combat these challenges and connect families separated by military service.

Project Video Connect, offered by the Red Cross, does not provide face-to-face interaction, but it does let families send video messages with sound.

Even traditional video gives soldier and families a more personal feel than just pictures or regular e-mail, says Amanda Lepof, who helps manage the project.

Fifty Red Cross chapters across the country have been equipped with stations where military families can create and send video messages by e-mail to loved ones deployed overseas. Audio and video streaming allows the families to send high-quality video without creating large file attachments.

Then troops can access the messages via an e-mail notification on any computer with a broadband Internet connection. The messages are stored on the server, which allows recipients to access them again later if they want to.

In most cases, troops overseas, even in war zones, now have access to telephones and e-mail. Internet facilities in Iraq are currently available to more than 132,000 troops, and there are plans for 32 new facilities at base camps. Service personnel in Iraq made 1.2 million phone calls from these stations in May alone, says Marsha Hassell of the Naval Weapons Station in Charleston, S.C., where these mobile communication stations were developed.

The phone calls cost 4.7 cents a minute instead of the usual expensive overseas rates.

But video conferencing is the most exciting development. "There has been no reliable video conferencing available to soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan until now," says Mr. Harlow. "The bandwidth available to soldiers on existing military networks has been insufficient even to support reliable low-quality instant-messenger type of video conferencing."

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