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Fortunately, the government cannot enforce complete blackout because thousands of startlink terminals are active inside the country. They have been complaining
by falaki 9mo ago
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.aspx https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-R/conferences/RRB/Pages/Starlink....
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cre28d2j2zxo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cre28d2j2zxo
- tuhgdetzhh 9mo agoIsn't it possible to jam the starlink receiver?
- adrianpike 9mo agoYes, with the caveat that you'll need decent line of sight to it.
- falaki 9mo agoI 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.
- ReptileMan 9mo agoThe Russians are themselves heavy users of starlink.
- null_deref 9mo agoCan you provide a source for this claim?
- esseph 9mo agoStart here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_in_the_Russian-Ukrainian_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_in_the_Russian-Ukrain... Scroll down to Russian use. Starlink receivers have been found in use in drones by both sides in the war. There's a lot of Open Source intel on this.
- m4rtink 9mo agoI guess it is to a degree unavoidable - ukrainian units are using a lot of crowdfunded starlink terminals on the front, so even if you geo fenced usage only to the virtual cells outside of Russia controlled territory, you would also disable ukrainian sets at the front. So if Russians smuggle sets from other countries, they might not be really easy to tell from the "good" sets crowdsourced by the ukrainians and used at the front. As for use in long range strike UAVs I'm sure ukrainian units have specially registered units that will work anywhere but again, Russian long range kamikaze drones you have a smuggled unit that only activates once on ukrainian territory and be used for terminal guidance or reconnaissance. By the time the system spots a new terminal moving quickly in the wrong place the thing would have rammed into a civilian building somewhere.
- rasz 9mo agoIt doesnt matter where starlink terminals came from, all end up registered with Ukrainian MOD. Btw Poland pays subscription on ~50K of those.
- iammjm 9mo agoHere, have a video of the russian cavalry with a Starlink attached to a horse. Yes, you have read that right. 2026 btw. https://www.reddit.com/r/UkraineWarVideoReport/comments/1q7ii52/russian_soldiers_have_now_equipped_their_horses/ https://www.reddit.com/r/UkraineWarVideoReport/comments/1q7i... Also: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/01/08/russia-satellite-dishes-horses-battlefield-internet/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/01/08/russia-sat...
- deleted 9mo ago
- darubedarob 9mo ago[dead]
- throw0101d 9mo ago[flagged]
- gilrain 9mo agoThat link says the story was retracted.
- throw0101d 9mo ago> That link says the story was retracted. Since the original comment was flagged, the original link with the 2023 story with retraction: * https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/07/elon-musk-ordered-starlink-turned-off-ukraine-offensive-biography https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/07/elon-musk... A 2025 article, "Musk ordered shutdown of Starlink satellite service as Ukraine retook territory from Russia": > KYIV - During a pivotal push by Ukraine to retake territory from Russia in late September 2022, Elon Musk gave an order that disrupted the counteroffensive and dented Kyiv’s trust in Starlink, the satellite internet service the billionaire provided early in the war to help Ukraine’s military maintain battlefield connectivity. > “We have to do this,” Michael Nicolls, the Starlink engineer, told colleagues upon receiving the order, one of these people said. Staffers complied, the three people told Reuters, deactivating at least a hundred Starlink terminals, their hexagon-shaped cells going dark on an internal map of the company’s coverage. The move also affected other areas seized by Russia, including some of Donetsk province further east. […] > After the book was published, Musk denied a shutdown, saying that there had never been coverage in Crimea to begin with. He said he had, rather, rejected a Ukrainian request to provide service ahead of Kyiv’s planned attack. Isaacson later conceded his account was flawed. A spokesperson at Isaacson’s publisher declined to comment or make him available for an interview. […] > As Ukraine’s counterattack intensified, Russian President Vladimir Putin on September 21, 2022, ordered a partial mobilization of reservists, Russia’s first since World War II. He also threatened to use nuclear weapons if Russia’s own “territorial integrity” were at risk. Around this time, Musk engaged in weeks of backchannel conversations with senior officials in the administration of President Joe Biden, according to three former U.S. government officials and one of the people familiar with Musk’s order to stop service. During those conversations, the former White House staffer told Reuters, U.S. intelligence and security officials expressed concern that Putin could follow through on his threats. Musk, this person added, worried too, and asked U.S. officials if they knew where and how Ukraine used Starlink on the battlefield. > Soon after, he ordered the shutdown. * https://www.reuters.com/investigations/musk-ordered-shutdown-starlink-satellite-service-ukraine-retook-territory-russia-2025-07-25/ https://www.reuters.com/investigations/musk-ordered-shutdown...
- lostlogin 9mo ago> Starlink became very good at thwarting jamming. Musk proved quite good at blocking Ukrainian Starlink access too, supporting Russia. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66752264 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66752264
- EthanHeilman 9mo agoYes, 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.
- edoceo 9mo agoMultibeam too, right?
- almosthere 9mo ago[flagged]
- weregiraffe 9mo ago>targeting the satellite itself with a directed radio beam And good luck targeting enough Starlink satellites...
- H8crilA 9mo agoJust to add more details. Beamforming is essentially yet another way to achieve gain, just like one does with a directional antenna. The Starlink terminal achieves a gain of roughly 33 dB, which means it talks (and also listens) in the peak direction at power levels that are around 2000x higher than what one would achieve with isotropic antennas. 2000x sounds like a lot, but it is actually not impossible to reach. Consumer electronics sends at most a few Watts of RF power, but serious jammers of the type used by militaries can run kilowatts. If you consider the peak power used for brief moments of time then you can get as high as megawatts - the famous AWACS aircraft briefly flash half a continent at somewhere around 1 MW, with average TX power of ~single digit kilowatt.
- throwaway894345 9mo agoI'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?
- everfrustrated 9mo agoFrom what I read, the Russians were targeting Starlink terminals based on the built-in wifi access point not the Starlink frequencies.
- BenjiWiebe 9mo agoWell the better your beam is directed, the less lateral noise there is. A simple 3 element yagi has <1% of the power to the sides. It has more of the power straight behind it, but still 1% or so of the main lobe.
- throwaway894345 9mo agoIs 1% still quite a lot louder than other things in the same band?
- runlaszlorun 9mo agoI read the satellite has an omnidirectional antenna?
- Noaidi 9mo agoDestroy the satellites? I mean all that have to do is screw up the trajectory of some of the satellites to cause exponential collisions...
- bhhaskin 9mo agoIran does not have that capability. But that would also be an act of war.
- Noaidi 9mo agoNo, it wouldn’t be an act of war, it would be “a military operation”.
- octoberfranklin 9mo agoFlinging spacejunk pollution into orbit is extremely simple if you have rockets. Iran has lots of rockets. Iran also has basically zero of their own satellites in orbit that they care about. Spacejunk is a highly asymmetric tactic.
- yehoshuapw 9mo agothey do have satellites. I'm less sure about how much they care about them - but they are not cheap
- octoberfranklin 9mo agoThat's my point. They have so few that sacrificing them would be irrelevant.
- bhhaskin 9mo agoThey don't have that many rockets that are capable of orbital flight let alone an ASAT capability. Imagine trying to hit a specific speeding car by throwing a dart from another moving car, except Both cars are invisible most of the time. They’re moving 17,000 mph. The dart has no steering wheel only tiny nudges. If you miss by a few feet, you miss by miles. Countries that can do this reliably aren’t showing off missiles they’re showing off navigation, sensors, computing. The weapon is the least impressive part.
- GaggiX 9mo agoThey 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 9mo agoThere are ~100,000 users, about 0.1% of the population: https://www.newsweek.com/starlink-usage-iran-skyrockets-break-internet-law-rebel-restrictions-2011111 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 9mo agoHow are there so many users, see my other comment but i will ask here as well but starlink's american company and sanctioned iran so how do the details really work? And how do starlink recievers enter the country in the first place? This is good that there is still a way to get censorship resistance even after all this perhaps joining it with other protocols which can work via bluetooth,wifi etc. and are more secure connecting to something like this, a secure internet access point could be developed but I don't know too much about it.
- petre 9mo agoBlack market. We had satellite dishes in Eastern Europe during communism. Bribe some people, shell out some insane amounts of cash and it can be done.
- helloaltalt 9mo agoIf black market's the only reason that activism/journalism/outside contact is even possible in the country It doesn't seem much of a plan (very sadly, I wish there was) which could be uncensored that much, some other comment pointed this point too but if black market's the case, then they would just hide whoever is using this They would also most likely be very less in amount, journalists etc. But the average person, they are stuck without proper internet I thought that there are materials which can build starlink and the only thing then you need is just subscription or something It's just sad to see that black market is the only way.
- tguvot 9mo agoin 2019 internet shutdown happened just before crackdown on protests
- bawolff 9mo agoProbably the goal of the blackouts is to hinder organizing on social media, discord, whatsapp, etc, not to prevent news getting out.
- themafia 9mo ago> social media which has enabled analyses Social media is such a narrow lens that I would be cautious accepting that analysis at face value.
- estimator7292 9mo ago[flagged]
- themafia 9mo agoIf you want a sober and thorough analysis then using a single source is a bad idea. This does not involve feelings, in fact, quite the opposite. If you want my feelings, then yes, I do think it's chilling that people can satisfy themselves that a few select videos from a foreign area is enough intelligence to make a decision about war. If you've never had the pleasure of working in a war zone after the troops have left then I think you should ponder the consequences of your analysis a little more deeply.
- protocolture 9mo agoWhere 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.
- bawolff 9mo ago> 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?
- theLegionWithin 9mo agoyes
- protocolture 9mo agoNo, because they arent trying to prevent all communication with the outside world, they are trying to prevent organisation within their country. Leaving 0.1% of users online is acceptable. Now if they actually did want to censor the internet, Suicide McBombervest or a missile or something would find that ground station. They simply dont give a shit.
- weezing 9mo agoOf course they do give a shit. Last thing they want is Turkish boots on the ground, a country way closer culturally than US or Israel.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]