Communications technology is split into two distinct types: lightspeed and subspace.

Lightspeed

Lightspeed communication encompasses all standard forms of communication, including radio and laser transmissions. These travel at the speed of light, and at typical civilization scales, a message can take several hours to cross between population centers within the same star system. Fiber optic cables are also utilized when possible, within space infrastructure and on planetary surfaces.

Read more: Lasers

Faster-Than-Light

Subspace transmitters allow for rapid communication across interstellar distances, operating on a fundamental aspect of warp technology: warp drives create waves through spacetime that propagate at approximately 970 times the speed of light, allowing neighboring star systems lightyears apart to communicate on timescales of only several hours.

While all warp drives create ripples as a byproduct of their operation (consequently making themselves easily trackable), dedicated subspace communication relays are utilized in all developed space to send messages between systems. Transmissions of this type are omnidirectional, meaning that any message sent by a transmitter is inherently broadcast in all directions, able to be picked up by any receiver throughout civilization. These transmitters are however relatively slow and cumbersome to transmit from, resulting in information bottlenecks.

Read more: Subspace Transmitters