Underwater Laser Telemetry and Remote Access: a revolutionary laser communication system for high band-width, subsea IoT
ULTRA is high-speed fiberoptic, without the fiber.
Oceanit is developing ULTRA, a high-speed subsea communications system capable of wireless, long-range, high-bandwidth data transfer. Umbilicals and wired infrastructure connections have proven extremely costly to place and maintain with underwater ROVs. It is even harder for that infrastructure to communicate with ROVs themselves, or to the surface. Acoustic communication is the most readily available technology for subsea communications, but can only deliver data at rates around 10 kbit/sec.
ULTRA utilizes point-to-point, tight-beam lasers to enable gigabit bandwidth wireless communications over distances of 100+ meters, running through low-power sensor nodes with embedded targeting and tracking capabilities.
ULTRA has a much longer range current systems and is unaffected by acoustically ‘noisy’ environments. ULTRA takes advantage of a distributed network of low-power battery nodes which communicate to a submerged hub before relaying signals to the surface or to ROVs/AUVs. The distributed nodes will not utilize lasers, but rather modulating reflectors encode a signal on top of a beam sent from the hub.
The higher data rates made possible by the system will provide actionable information for multiple subsea use cases. ULTRA enables more efficient operations and situational awareness across a wide variety of subsea IoT devices.
