Nokia and Vodafone are bringing 4G LTE to the Moon for scientific purposes. Meanwhile, rural Nevada Earthlings are stuck on 3G or worse.
If you live in rural Nevada, Montana, Wyoming, Washington, or any of the other places where people struggle to get a 4G LTE signal from any of the four major wireless carriers, you might be happy to know Moon people will soon have faster internet than you.
That’s right, 4G LTE data is coming to the Moon. Since the current population of our natural satellite is (reportedly) zero, one might wonder why the Moon needs fast data speeds while many of us Earthlings are stuck on 3G or worse.
If you guessed “science,” then you get a moon-shaped sticker! New-space firm PTScientists wants to send quattro rovers (partially engineered with Audi) to explore the surface of our lunar neighbor and return to the Apollo 17 landing site. Maybe the company intends to show that the landing site isn’t there, since the Moon landing was a hoax.
OK, that last part was made up. PTScientists wants to explore the Moon with its rovers and beam back HD video to the Autonomous Landing and Navigation Module (ALINA). Doing this with analog radio would require a lot of energy and data transfer would be slow. With 4G LTE, PTScientists would be much better off. After making a formal request, Vodafone and Nokia decided to partner up to test out some space-grade mobile network equipment to blanket the moon in 4G LTE and make PTScientists’ dreams a reality.
While this all probably sounds like a waste of money and resources to curmudgeons who hate science and the awesome stuff humanity can do to advance the species, this rollout will be a terrific opportunity to test new space-grade equipment and advance technology in networking, processing, and storage.
“These aims have potentially wide-ranging implications for many stakeholders and humanity as a whole, and we look forward to working closely with Vodafone and the other partners in the coming months, prior to the launch in 2019,” said Nokia CTO Marcus Weldon. So don’t worry, capitalism will still profit from this, which is all that’s important, right?
