Comment by GaggiX
3 days ago
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.
3 days ago
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.
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.
How 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.
Tools to evade state surveillance and censorship are explicitly exempted from US sanctions against Iran.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us-expands-sanctions-exception...
As long as starlink isn't forced to geofence an area, anyone can buy a terminal anywhere and smuggle it in as any other drug or contraband. The mini's are about the same size as a laptop
Black 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.
3 replies →
Possibly the number of users is even larger, if people can share a terminal. Wifi 802.11s Mesh with Batman routing scales very well to huge sizes.
This is already assuming terminal and account sharing. I meant to link this story, the original source: https://www.iranintl.com/en/202501060034. The stat is based on 30,000 unique users. I don't know how many actual terminals there are, probably a few thousand.
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
Starlink receivers are actually very complicated. They make use of a bunch of high-end FPGAs and a bunch of other expensive and uncommon components. See this teardown: https://youtu.be/h6MfM8EFkGg?si=m-sN6UW4nh8_HzPR.
Yes, there are NGOs and organizations that sponsor these and pay for them. Here is an example: https://www.forbes.com/sites/cyrusfarivar/2024/12/18/inside-...
Forbes asking me to pay
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here's an web.archive.org link if anyone's interested which works
https://web.archive.org/web/20250301050041/https://www.forbe...
Edit: WTF forbes still gives me a popup even in archive, strange, but its less restrictive overall in the web archive version so I am able to still copy and read the version
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> 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?
Starlink uses a pretty sophisticated phased array antenna, so not something you can easily build in your garage.
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I wonder how easy is it to get contraband into the country. The country's huge, and with the current govt not being the most popular or financially well off, I guess there are quite a few border officers willing to make some extra money.
Starlink receivers aren't built out of common readily available components. It's fancy RF stuff.
Those who have one surely keep that fact secret.