Comment by burkaman
3 days ago
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.
If 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.
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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.