Still blows my mind that the Voyagers use only a 23 Watt radio which is less then 8x as powerful as your 3Watt cell phone.
Remember Power is King.
That’s what all those turbo FEC codes are for. Really slow data rates though. Lots of patralels in some of the long range 'narrow band’s IoT systems like sigfox and weightless.
One of my colleagues, a (Hungarian guy named “Jort” ) wrote some the Philae lander code years and years ago. He had tears of joy when it finally landed. 
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