By Arthur Firstenberg - January 17, 2022

In 2018, on land and in space,preparations to deploy millions of antennas were very publicly being made and advertised, for “5G,” “Smart Cities,” and the “Internet of Things.”

At the same time, and without any publicity, governments, research laboratories, and commercial and military interests were collaborating on plans to create “Smart Oceans” and the “Internet of Underwater Things” (IoUT). They did not consult the fishes, whales, dolphins, octopuses, and other inhabitants of those depths.

In the United States, the National Science Foundation funded what it called the SEANet Project. The goal was to enable broadband wireless communication from any point on or in the oceans to anywhere else on the planet or in space. The Internet of Underwater Things is being designed to enable all the same communication capabilities that are being provided on land, including “real-time video streaming from underwater.”

In the last three years, a flood of papers have been published by scientists and engineers in the U.S., China, Pakistan, Qatar, South Korea, Spain, Australia, Greece, Italy, France, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere. In 2020, the IEEE Internet of Things Journal published a Special Issue on Internet of Things for Smart Ocean. In 2019, the journal Sensors published a Special Issue on Smart Ocean: Emerging Research Advances, Prospects and Challenges, and the same journal is now publishing another Special Issue on Internet of Underwater Things.

Some of the activities that supposedly “need” this technology in the oceans are:

- Climate change monitoring
- Pollution control and tracking
- Disaster prevention including tsunami warning systems
- Ocean exploration

- Fishing and aquaculture
- Coral reef harvesting
- Tectonic plate monitoring
- Navigation
- Global oceanic trade
- Oil and gas exploration and production
- Military communication and surveillance

The infrastructure that is beginning to be deployed, throughout the oceans, includes:

- Sensors and antennas (“nodes”) on the ocean floor
- Nodes at different depths
- Surface nodes
- Relay antennas at different depths to transmit data vertically from the ocean floor to the ocean surface, and horizontally between nodes
- Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs)
- Autonomous Surface Vehicles (ASVs)
- Underwater robots
- Wireless surface buoys
- Smart boats and ships
- Smart submarines
- Smart shores

Communication being more difficult to accomplish underwater than through the air, and more subject to interference, several different types of communication media are being used in the oceans to send data at different speeds and over different distances. Acoustic waves, radio waves, lasers, LED light, and magnetic induction are all being used to flood the oceans with data.

An underwater GPS system is being developed. Most of these media work only for short- to medium-range communication. Long-range communication relies on acoustic waves, and is similar to the technology used in ocean sonar.

These technologies are already being marketed commercially and installed in the world’s oceans today . . .

[SNIP]