Japanese tech company Kyocera has developed underwater optical communications (UWOC) technology that enables short-distance, high-speed wireless communication. According to its press release, this allows data transmission speeds of up to 5.2 Gbps in freshwater laboratory settings, which is much faster than the few Mbps that typical underwater acoustic communications systems achieve.
The company achieved this by developing a laser specifically tailored for underwater communications using its own protocols and physical layers. Aside from that, it has an optical front-end circuit — the hardware that converts light into electrical signals — that can hit bandwidths greater than 1 GHz, making it around 2.5x faster than its competition.
