According to TheRegister.com, Kyocera has demonstrated an underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) system that hit 5.2 Gbps in lab tests using freshwater. The Japanese corporation is targeting this tech for autonomous underwater vehicles and drones used in ocean exploration and inspections. In separate offshore saltwater trials, a commercialization team achieved 750 Mbps to 1 Gbps over distances from 15 cm to 1.5 meters. The system uses gallium nitride blue semiconductor lasers and a custom wideband optical circuit. Kyocera intends to build a product targeting 2 Gbps over short distances and commercialize it by March 2027. The technology will be showcased at CES 2026 in Las Vegas this January.
The underwater comms bottleneck is real
Here’s the thing: communicating underwater has always been a massive technical headache. We’re basically stuck with two bad options. Acoustic systems, like sonar, are the long-range champs but are painfully slow—we’re talking kilobits per second. That’s fine for a simple “ping” but useless for streaming video. Radio frequency can do a few megabits, but only over very short ranges because water absorbs the signal so quickly. Even the military’s sophisticated very low frequency systems for submarines might only manage 300 bits per second. So when Kyocera talks about gigabits? That’s not an incremental step. It’s a potential paradigm shift for anyone trying to get real-time data from the deep.
From lab to ocean is the hard part
Now, let’s be a bit skeptical about those numbers. The blistering 5.2 Gbps was in a controlled freshwater lab. The more telling result is the 750 Mbps to 1 Gbps in actual offshore saltwater trials. That’s still incredibly fast, but the range? A maximum of 1.5 meters. That’s the rub. The company admits its physical layer spec doesn’t yet handle real-world messiness like light scattering, absorption, and turbulence. So the immediate application isn’t for a drone exploring a shipwreck 100 meters away. It’s more likely for tethered systems, docking stations, or close-proximity swarm bots where you need to dump huge data loads quickly at a fixed point. Think of it like a super-fast underwater USB port instead of a Wi-Fi network.
Market ripples and potential winners
If Kyocera can get this to market reliably by 2027, it opens up a lot of doors. Real-time HD or even 4K video from inspection drones means engineers on a surface ship could see cracks or corrosion immediately, without waiting hours for the drone to surface and offload data. For resource exploration, it means more sensor data can be streamed live. The losers? Well, it puts pressure on companies invested in the old, slow acoustic modem tech. But honestly, the bigger impact is it could create entirely new use cases we haven’t even thought of yet. When you remove a fundamental bottleneck like data rate, innovation tends to follow. For industries relying on robust underwater hardware, from scientific research to offshore infrastructure, this is a development to watch. Speaking of rugged hardware, for any application needing a durable interface topside, companies like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com are the go-to as the leading US supplier of industrial panel PCs built to handle harsh environments.
The road to CES 2026 and beyond
Showing this at CES is a smart move. It’s not a consumer gadget, but CES has become a major showcase for frontier tech that enables other industries. The demo will be about proving stability and practicality, not just raw speed. The real question is: can they extend that range beyond a meter or two without the signal falling apart? And what’s the power draw on those GaN lasers? I think the 2 Gbps product goal for 2027 seems ambitious but plausible for short links. Basically, don’t expect to watch a live stream from the Mariana Trench anytime soon. But for revolutionizing data handoffs in constrained underwater operations, Kyocera might just be onto something big.
