If water can transfer sound (low frequencies) 4 times faster than air, can it do the same for higher frequencies?
could you encode megabits/s at an ideal physical frequency range and transmit it over rivers, seas, or even oceans?
I’m thinking that the Air is probably one of the worst data transmission mediums available, it’s useful to us for mobile communications (cellphones, tv) since we humans in 2010 live above ground, however it’s not very good for transcontinental data transfer, the curvature of the air and weather conditions affect it and we have to use satellite and undersea cables to transfer data when it comes to intercontinental distances.
I wonder if instead of using undersea cables (which can be vandalized), wouldn’t it make sense to send data directly over water in a P2P fashion?
What limitations would exist? Signal Interference, Signal noise, curvature of the earth (how often you’d need to put re-transmission/routing nodes).
The idea would be to have thousands (or actually as least as possible) buoyant computers to route data packets from continent to continents. (submarines can transmit data, so it must be doable)
The decentralization of data transfer would make it more reliable, also there would be no-one owner of this transmission network controlling the price of transmission, all the network stack would be based on open standards.
If there are any physicists reading, I’d love to hear your opinions based on your knowledge of Wave Physics and it’s applications for data transmission over water as medium.
Update: It seems it’s very feasible, I found the following illustration on a patent for a similar idea.
It seems most of the current applications for this idea are for military, submarines and planes. I’m thinking of this but for the internet. There are many countries who are currently not connected to high speed internet backbones, with this technology every coast in the world could potentially have better access to the internet.