Sounds like a scenario that would make many people in regional Australia very happy.

And as much as it would be fantastic to be reporting on that situation, this story is about something altogether different.

This is about a 4G network on the Moon!

Why you say? Why not is the resounding response. Berlin based PTScientists is set to achieve the first ever privately funded Moon landing fifty years after the first NASA astronauts walked on the Moon.

A quick newsflash here to the twenty per cent of Americans who still believe the conspiracy that man hasn’t walked on the Moon. We did.

Mission to the Moon is due to launch in 2019 from Cape Canaveral on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Apart from the array of communication equipment, onboard the rocket will also be two Audi lunar quattro rovers.

The rovers will communicate and transfer scientific data and HD video while studying various aspects of the moon – including NASA’s Apollo 17 lunar roving vehicle which was last used to explore the Taurus-Littrow valley in 1972 (newsflash for the twenty five per cent of non-believing Britons – men from Earth drove the lunar vehicle while they were on the Moon).

While the network on the Moon will be comparable in speed - if not surface area - to 4G networks on the Earth, communicating back and forth to various parts of the Moon is obviously not the end game here. We want information to come back to Earth – and that is where distance presents a minor problem.

The Moon is in an elliptical orbit around the Earth but, on average, the distance between the surface of the Moon and the surface of the Earth is 384,400km.

By comparison, geostationary satellites used for communication on Earth orbit at 35,786km above the ground. Electromagnetic waves travel at approximately 3 x 108 ms-1 so that means a signal transmitted from the Moon will take about 1.3 seconds to reach the Earth.

When the data is travelling in just the one direction that amount of latency is not a major drama. Once we get a few people living on the Moon, that latency will make for a very stilted conversation when talking to people back on Earth.  That probably won’t be a major issue though.

Although the mobile carriers across the world seem to have a reasonable arrangement for international roaming rates, I imagine that the initial prices for interlunar roaming may be horrendous. Maybe that will be a good thing with data used for more important things than super slow mo videos of cats being uploaded to a variety of social media sites.

PTScientists was originally founded to compete for the US$20 Million Google Lunar XPrize that was to be awarded to the first private company to land a spacecraft on the Moon and beam back HD video. This mission won’t meet the deadline set by Google but PTScientists is pushing on regardless.

The advantage for all of us, apart from the pretty pictures and the possibility that the twenty eight per cent of Russians who currently believe in the Moon conspiracy theories may start to change their minds, is that pushing this technology to its limits and creating compact and efficient 4G networks will enable future scientific breakthroughs and more efficient means of creating 4G networks.

And maybe that will lead to other barren, sparse landscapes receiving 4G coverage – but this time those landscapes will be in regional Australia!

App of the Week this week is, not surprisingly, linked to the Moon. Lunar Phase is the App of the Week. This is just one of many apps that allows you to see exact details of Moon phases and various attributes of the Moon. Once we have a couple of Audi quattro rovers on the Moon you may be more interested in exactly what the Moon is doing.