I was familiar with Project Sanguine, but had hoped there were less ambitious public projects I had overlooked (perhaps closer to VLF which operates <30m seawater depths).
After reading about the Navy E-6B aircraft, which trails a 5km antenna behind it to communicate with subs, I had presumed modern 'submarine -> other underwater radios' were akin to large commercial fishing trawling nets - or the really long antennas were packed into hilbert curves and epoxied to the hulls or something.
Anyhow, it seems 'acoustic modems' using 'CSMA' [1] are the norm for commercial underwater ROVs (such as James Gosling's 'wavegliders' [2]).
and interesting detail here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Sanguine