[falaki]

Fortunately, the government cannot enforce complete blackout because thousands of startlink terminals are active inside the country. They have been complaining about it [1] to no avail. Using these terminals activists and journalists continue to upload videos of demonstrations to social media which has enabled analyses that show demonstrations are very wide spread [2] and continue to grow.

[1] https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-R/conferences/RRB/Pages/Starlink....

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cre28d2j2zxo

[bawolff]

Probably the goal of the blackouts is to hinder organizing on social media, discord, whatsapp, etc, not to prevent news getting out.

[GaggiX]

They are almost completely inaccessible to the average Iranian. A friend of mine who has come a long way to fight Iranian censorship told me that they essentially don't exist.

[burkaman]

There are ~100,000 users, about 0.1% of the population: https://www.newsweek.com/starlink-usage-iran-skyrockets-brea...

Compare that to the number of cell phone users which is very close to 100%. All estimates of the number of mobile subscribers or number of mobile phone numbers are greater than the total population.

[helloaltalt]

They must be smuggled inside the country and the dictatorship can say anything they want and charge if they get caught so they must be very few in numbers

I don't know too much about starlink but is there a way that someone can pay for other person's usage and then build a starlink receiver or something from spare parts or like easy accesible parts from the world?

Because how would people get starlink device. I dont know the mecanism of startlink though or how it works

[BurningFrog]

Those who have one surely keep that fact secret.

[protocolture]

Where are the ground stations Iranian traffic is using?

Starlink usually lacks the bandwidth to tunnel traffic very far. In most countries the ground station is in the same country. My bet is, a neighboring country, within reach of Iranian missiles. Oman and Turkey are listed but that data is old.

But its not about censorship in the usual sense really. Its about preventing peer to peer communication. With less than a percent of iranians having access to each other either locally or via foreign internet, they cut down their ability to organise significantly. Starlink doesnt offer a solution here. Starlink doesnt matter. Every starlink person could turn up to a protest and it would still be less impactful than previous protests.

[hdgvhicv]

My starlink in Afghanistan downlinks in Sofia.

The problem with starlink is when the taliban turn off the intenet, if you use it to concerning (tweet, talk to news channel, post a podcast), the governemt know.

[bawolff]

> Starlink usually lacks the bandwidth to tunnel traffic very far. In most countries the ground station is in the same country. My bet is, a neighboring country, within reach of Iranian missiles. Oman and Turkey are listed but that data is old.

You really think iran is going to bomb turkey (a nato country) over this?

[tuhgdetzhh]

Isn't it possible to jam the starlink receiver?

[EthanHeilman]

Yes, but it is more difficult than jamming a typical radio antenna because the starlink uses a directed beam rather than a omnidirectional radio broadcast. This either requires enormous amounts of power, targeting the satellite itself with a directed radio beam, or getting between the satellite and the ground station by bouncing a signal off the ionosphere.

The above is for jamming directed beams in general. It is likely that starlink has a number of other jamming countermeasures.

[falaki]

I hear after the Ukraine war, Starlink became very good at thwarting jamming. I am confident the Iranians are not as sophisticated as the Russians in than front.

[adrianpike]

Yes, with the caveat that you'll need decent line of sight to it.

[throwaway894345]

I've got to think it's easy to find starlink receivers--I know they use a directed beam but they must give off a bunch of lateral noise, right? Or does Starlink use the same frequency bands as other common equipment such that it would be difficult to distinguish starlink signals from others? If the government was motivated they could surely start finding these receivers, right?

[Noaidi]

Destroy the satellites? I mean all that have to do is screw up the trajectory of some of the satellites to cause exponential collisions...

[themafia]

> social media which has enabled analyses

Social media is such a narrow lens that I would be cautious accepting that analysis at face value.

[tguvot]

in 2019 internet shutdown happened just before crackdown on protests