Underwater Wireless Networks The Inventivity Pod

George Sklivanitis, founder of Extreme Comms Lab, believes we can build underwater wireless networks. Using enhanced modems on existing nodes (such as ships and submarines), his team’s technology can boost signal strength under the sea by 10 times.   A native of Athens, Greece, George studied on the island of Crete before moving to Buffalo NY, and finally Florida Atlantic University. His advice to prospective inventors: “Use criticism as a fuel to keep going. Don’t give up.”   
 
TRANSCRIPT:
 
Intro: 0:01
Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade, a podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida, the museum is named after James Robert Cade, who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We'll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them, we'll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace.
Richard Miles: 0:39
IPhones , deep sea Netflix and scuba surround sound. Sounds impossible, right? Maybe it still is. But my guests this morning may have brought us a step or two closer to a bunch of impossible things. I'm your host Richard Miles. My guest today is George Sklivanitis founder of Extreme Comms Lab. Welcome to Radio Cade, George.
George Sklivanitis: 0:58
Thank you Richard for the invitation.
Richard Miles: 0:59
So let's start George, talking about your core technology , sort of what is it and how does it work?
George Sklivanitis: 1:04
So today we're living in exciting times, right? Every day we are using devices that are almost always, and at any time connected to the internet from your smartphones to your smart watches, to Alexa at home to Siri, you name it. Can we leverage this exciting technology developments that we have seen for land-based communications and somehow use them to wirelessly connect our oceans, to the internet? Well, to give you an idea of what's the existing infrastructure out there, first of all, it's very expensive and it's very limited. U.S. Navy. For example, the submarines are using acoustic signals to communicate. The signals are very low frequency, very low bandwidth. And as a result, under water communications today is very, very slow. So the Extreme Comms Lab, we started to change that by building underwater communication modems, that can boost wireless connectivity up to 10 times. This moden scan communicate in 360 degrees. They are only directional. They can both transmit and receive, and they are fully reprogrammable on the fly so that they can efficiently utilize all of their available resources. We have buttoned pending software and hardware, which is easy to install, easy to operate and offer compatibility with existing infrastructure. So we are trying to disrupt underwater communications today to give you an example, the state of the art modems out there, it's like using your 1990s , dial up modem to download an email or stream a video from the web. It would take forever, right?
Richard Miles: 2:33
So I remember those days well, I winced just hearing that, but, okay. So in addition to this sounding very, very cool. This household sounds very, very expensive because if I understand the analogy correctly, if we think about above ground , right, we have cell phone towers and wireless networks, and that has been built up over a decade or so of cell phone towers on every corner. Is that also how this would work? Would you have the equivalent of towers underwater or buoys underwater that would be serving the s