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Nokia, Vodafone To Bring 4G To the Moon (reuters.com)
According to Reuters, the moon will get its first mobile phone network next year, enabling high-definition streaming from the landscape back to earth. "Vodafone Germany, network equipment maker Nokia and carmaker Audi said on Tuesday they were working together to support the mission, 50 years after the first NASA astronauts walked on the moon." From the report: Vodafone said it had appointed Nokia as its technology partner to develop a space-grade network which would be a small piece of hardware weighing less than a bag of sugar. The companies are working with Berlin-based company PTScientists on the project, with a launch scheduled in 2019 from Cape Canaveral on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, Vodafone said. One executive involved said the decision to build a 4G network rather than a state-of-the-art 5G network was taken because the next generation networks remain in the testing and trial stage and are not stable enough to ensure they would work from the lunar surface.
But the moon gets a new cell tower?
Love these new units. They leave no room for ambiguity.
Have gnu, will travel.
walks on the moon and talks of God.
Germany puts it brands on the moon and talks of the optics of branding.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I guess Verizon won't have the most coverage any more.
ET can finally phone home.
Here I am living 5 miles from Vodafone's global headquarters and I can't get any reception from them, but oh.. the moon gets 4G .. great.. thanks!
Good..over.
would be a small piece of hardware weighing less than a bag of sugar
I don't understand. What is that in Libraries of Congress?
It’s hard to believe this isn’t an Onion link.
Why do this?
This looks like a ploy to generate investment money for PTScientists, a company that claims to have developed a spacecraft capable of delivering two rovers, or up to 100 kg of payload, to the lunar surface. No mention of a rocket, rocket tests or any aerospace industry activity at all, except for designing two rovers, probably in their basement.
A 5lb bag, a 10lb bag, or a 25lb bag?
(A 2K bag, a 4K bag, or 10K bag for most of the world.)
Inquiring minds want to know.
- Who you gonna call?
That's the question.
The Don called. You know he's big on equal rights for everyone. He said "and the little green men are going to pay for it.
Kelly tried to tell him there isn't a dark side – the far side is lit half the time. and there aren't any little green men. Donald wasn't having any of that though. Then he started rambling about how it'll be the best, the biggest. Yuge.
Every time a cryptocoin goes to the moon, I always miss out. What is this 4G coin, anyway?
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DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
Treason can only be committed during times of war. Unless we have secretly declared war on Russia, there can be no treason.
It would be nice if they would work towards covering places where people currently live rather than places where people currently won't be for another decade.
Please stop this nonsense
Our planet earth have been so polluted by all kinds of man-made radio-noises that astrologists had to go somewhere really remote (like in a middle of a desert or high up in a remote mountain) in order to take credible readings on radio-frequencies beaming from outside planet earth
Now that the far side of the moon is still 'prestine', void of the tons of man-made radio noises, it would still be the perfect location to gather radio wave data from distant galaxies
With the 'bags of sugar' size 'radio transporters' the moon's radio silence may soon be a thing of the past
I am reminded of a scene from WALL-E, as the ship he's holding onto flies past the moon, an electronic billboard light up, advertising the imminent arrival of a shopping mall, or something of that nature.
We haven't been to the moon in decades, and now these guys wanna stick a bunch of commercial cell data relay stations up there? What's the matter, simple radio isn't good enough for the moon, but it's good enough for a satellite that's somewhere out past Pluto?
Does that mean ping times are less than a second?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
There has got to be a joke in there somewhere. Or up there, or wherever...
Why is Snark Required?
OK, this is merely a publicity stunt. But if Musk is planning to populate Mars, we need to start thinking about this sort of thing.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
...I expected that they were going to launch a Nokia smartphone in the space, just like Musk did with his car.
"a space-grade network which would be a small piece of hardware weighing less than a bag of sugar."
It's for incisive technological analysis such as the about that I come to slashdot.
How about getting your earth bound customer systems working first?
If only Vodafone would put some of the effort they expend on stunts like this -- or better still a fraction of the effort they spend on tax dodging -- into their customer records keeping, complaints handling and service functions they may end up with a different reputation to the one they have now.
Vodafone is on my "back of the queue, never deal with again" list having incorrectly billed for thousands of pounds (twice), "fixed" the error, billed again, threatened bailiffs and repeated the fiasco again months after I'd left them.
Yet, they can afford stunts like this whilst not being able to check their databases and CRM systems for duplicate entries.
Scratch past the PR stunt, name droping, etc.
Eventually, as more missions on the moon happens, you'll have more data to send from the probes on the moon back to earth.
It doesn't make sense economically to build every single last device with a high gain radio equipment able to beam it's own data directly to earth.
You'll eventually need an infrastructure of (relatively) high speed, high bandwidth local network (to communicate between the various probes/robots/landers/base station), and relays that uplink them to earth.
What are you going to do :
- Completely re-invent something from the ground up for the specific need of the mission ?
(which actually is a valid strategy : that's the current situation on Mars with probe using sattelite relays)
- Try to see if you can deploy easly availble and widely tested already existing solution ?
(which is the idea behind this project)
Of course, as the whole purpose of this type of solution is to use cheap of-the-shelf elements, you're going to ask some current big players in the field to help deploy the current-day solution. And of course, the big players will seize the solution to spin it as publicity.
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Also, the Nokia 3310 is probably orbital-reentry-proof, and thus naturally the solution picked up by NASA as a Space-modem. :-P
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
...Samsung announced that it will enter in partnership with Nokia and Vodafone to bring 4G connectivity to the Moon. Samsung will develop a new fuel and ignition system for space rockets, thanks to the experience gained with the Samsung Galaxy project.
Finally, what took them so long?!
No wonder we humans haven't gone back to the moon yet...
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Instead of the Moon, they should do something about the Antartica still not having stable, high-speed voice / video / digital data access. We want the Yorimoi girl quartet to continue streaming even after they have disembarked from the icebreaker!
The lack of coverage was a real deal-breaker. Now I can go without missing out on my daily /.
Is there a ring of communication satellites pointed at the moon or will it depend on the spotty coverage provided by the NASA space array?
Roughly one second delay might still be acceptable for audio or video communcation, but it will surely take some time getting used to.
Would make for some good commercials.
Hate to see the roaming charges tho... :O
Sounds like someone is using a Cubesat module.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"