Uninet

The Uninet (Universal Network) is a communication network used by most of civilization to exchange information for government, commercial, academic, social, and recreational purposes. It allows for communication and information sharing between distant unassociated computer networks all operating on the same fundamentals. A large subset of the uninet operates based off of the UDSN (Universal Data Synchronization Network), an interplanetary and interstellar network concept that works to synchronize and standardize information exchange across light-lag distances.

Commercial enterprises use the uninet to share marketing data, academic institutions to publish and discuss scientific analysis, and individual people for maintaining social activities across the reaches of space. The uninet can trace its origins to well before humanity became an interplanetary civilization, when it was used on a global scale for real-time communication between anywhere on Home.

Limitations

A drawback of the uninet’s current reach is light lag; real-time communication beyond a single planet and perhaps its moons is fundamentally impossible due to the delay of lightspeed; text-form and pre-recorded video or VR are the standard for communication at such ranges. Within a single star system this is not generally a significant issue; large amounts of digital information can be easily transmitted across space, cached by any device to be used as needed. A modest starship will have more than enough free data storage available to automatically retrieve and archive a wide array of content, and anything additional can be requested and received in whatever light distance the ship is from the nearest available server. At global scales - across a single world and within its near orbital space - instant communication remains possible and is a staple of human society, controlled by localized networks.

The free flow of high-volume communication ends at the edges of any given solar system. The distance between different stars necessitates faster-than-light communication, which is currently possible only with subspace transmitters, which are both the backbone and bottleneck of interstellar communication. Subspace transmitters are stationary warp drives that fluctuate their field to encode data in warp waves for interstellar communication. Unfortunately, technological limitations restrict the rate at which these fluctuations can be made, resulting in a speed of communication magnitudes slower than the most basic laser arrays. Packets of data end up bottlenecked at transmitter relays waiting for their turn to be sent.