A Chinese-born Briton who graduated from Woolwich Polytechnic in east London and became director of research at a mobile phone company in Essex has won this year's Nobel prize for physics.

Charles Kuen Kao won half of the prestigious prize for research that allowed information to be sent in beams of light along glass fibres over distances of 100km and more. The research revolutionised modern communications.

Kao shares the prize with two Americans, George Smith and Willard Boyle at Bell Labs in New Jersey, who developed the charged-coupled device (CCD), more familiarly known as the miniature digital cameras now ubiquitous in devices as wide-ranging as mobile phones and spacecraft.

The 10m Swedish kronor (£818,000) prize money has been divided to give half to Kao, with Smith and Boyle taking a quarter each.

Announcing the award at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, the Nobel assembly credited Kao for "groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication". Smith and Boyle were honoured "for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit – the CCD sensor".

Speaking by phone to a press conference at the Karolinska Institute, Boyle said: "I have a lovely feeling all over my body."

The Nobel assembly said the research "helped to shape the foundations of today's networked societies. They have created many practical innovations for everyday life and provided new tools for scientific exploration".

Optical fibers make up the circulatory system of our communication-based society. The glass fibers allow for global broadband communications including the internet. Light flowing in thin threads of glass carries almost all of the telephony and data traffic. Text, music, images and video can be transferred around the globe in a split second.

The CCD is the digital camera's electronic eye. It revolutionised photography, allowing light to be captured electronically instead of on film. The technology is used in many medical applications, such as imaging inside the human body for both diagnostics and microsurgery.