There are a wide variety of applications supported by the mobile-satellite service for the general provision of voice and data communications to users of the maritime, aeronautical and communities. The applications include: emergency distress alerting and locating services, directdial telephone, data transfer, facsimile, telex, electronic mail (email), high-quality audio transmission and compressed (digital) video, still pictures, and videoconferencing. Digital data rates currently available from the different MSS providers vary from tens of bits-per-second – which is suitable for short messaging services to 64 kbit/s – which is suitable for many high-speed data applications. Even higher bit rates are planned.