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Am I the only one wondering what the point of this is?

Imagine you need robots and machines to work remotely on the moon without a human inside a cabin controlling things, without a line of sight and in a low power, low footprint form factor

Now you have 2 options:

1. Use off the shelf Quectel and Qualcomm devices and off the shelf existing embedded hardware. Then test and develop using common terrestrial networks and harden it for radiation. Pack and deploy.

2. Use something else that requires custom design, exotic hardware, untested interoperability, custom built terrestrial towers etc...

I'm going to vote on option 1 for saving time and money...

Yeah, 1) seems to be much more cost effective. Building the equipment on off-the-shelf hardware and software could potentially reduce the costs quite a lot, and there's no reason all the stuff around the lander shouldn't be able to communicate over standard TCP/IP instead of some proprietary protocol.

Thanks for the ideas, they seem reasonable.

In passing, I'd note that I don't think cell technology would work without LoS; also, there's no atmosphere to reflect off of.

I guess if they're just thinking of some comm system for the moon, it might as well be 4G. (I guess? I'm not qualified to answer this.)

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