How Do You Make LTE Relevant at MWC 2023? Fly It to the Moon

pcmag.com:

BARCELONA—Next to all of the demonstrations of 5G possibilities around the MWC show floor here, an exhibit that spotlights plain old 4G LTE might seem an irrelevant afterthought. Especially if no human being will be able to use the LTE hardware in question.

But the LTE project Nokia is showing off in a corner of its exhibit space targets a use case that was never on the map during LTE's buildout in the previous decade: the south pole of the Moon. 

NASA awarded Nokia a $14.1 million contract in 2020 to build the first lunar LTE network as part of a Tipping Point series of awards intended to advance technologies that could be of use in future NASA missions such as its Artemis moon shots. The gear from Nokia Bell Labs, built for an undisclosed cost, will hitch a ride to Earth’s satellite later this year as a payload on the space startup Intuitive Machines' IM-2 mission(Opens in a new window), to be launched by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. 

That Houston company’s Nova-C lander will include a Nokia LTE base station that it will use to communicate with a roughly suitcase-sized, four-wheeled rover—a full-scale model of which sits in a corner of Nokia’s setup here. 

“For the most part, we are leveraging out standard 3GPP technology,” principal investigator Luis Maestro told a group of journalists. The lander and rover will communicate on an 1,800MHz band using hardware based on Nokia’s Earthbound gear(Opens in a new window) but hardened for its unforgiving context—work that Maestro suggested could inform wireless deployments in some of Earth’s less accessible places.

In addition to extremes of heat and cold, this experimental setup will also face coverage constraints not found on Earth. Part of that is the Nova-C lander only