Without WiFi, life as we know it is pretty undesirable. Unless it’s your personal decision to take a set period away from that life, things can go a bit hay-wire and setting your sights on the ocean can be the worst of the lot.

Yet some good ol’ scientists are looking into making underwater WiFi a real thing. Because WiFi access on land operates via radio waves, it is a lot more difficult to transmit those sorts in salt water. Led by the U.S.A.’s Northeastern University, researchers are engaged in a four-year investigation of how to enable smart devices deep in the ocean to communicate with the land.

One of the key aims is to allow for the transmission of real-time data from underwater locations, which currently have limited communications capacities. It’s a long-standing problem, with the undersea networks now in existence each making use of their own protocols and infrastructure, leaving a mess of separate underwater systems, rather than one efficient, overarching system.

Science.

This project is attempting to advance the state of the art in underwater networking by investigating two fundamental issues.

First, it is developing technology to communicate over short-range links at higher transmission rates than available today.

Second, it is developing technology to integrate the newly-designed acoustic communication technology with the internet to guarantee interoperability with existing networks.

All this has the potential to enhance national security, border protection, anti-submarine warfare, environmental monitoring, tsunami detection, more accurate weather forecasting and in the oil and gas industry. So nothing to do with us and everything to do with power.

[source: techy]