[Starlink] Re: Starlink and Iran

[Inemesit Affia <inemesitaffia@gmail.com>]

Jan 15, 2026 11:31:04 AM Ulrich Speidel <u.speidel@auckland.ac.nz>:

> On 15/01/2026 11:06 pm, Inemesit Affia wrote:
>> 
>> You don't often get email from inemesitaffia@gmail.com. Learn why this is important[https://aka.ms/LearnAboutSenderIdentification]
>> Wrt to DTC, you'll need SIM's, e-SIM or physical. Much easier to make and ship than regular Starlink receiver. 4G requires mutual authentication.
> 
> Indeed, but that doesn't address problems related to user density - you really can't support tens of thousands of people in a city that way. It really only works for a handful of folks in a larger area at a time. It's not an easily scalable solution.

You don't need to help everyone to be of help.


> 
> 
> One NZ currently handles perhaps a few thousand TXT messages (if that many) via satellite a day in a country about 1/6th of the area of Iran and are actively rationing the service by making it a premium product even though few people can actually physically use it because terrestrial coverage is so good. This simply doesn't scale to anywhere near the needs of 90M+ Iranians, let alone in a few weeks. 
> 
>> 
>> There's more spectrum to use if the towers are switched off as opposed to not terminating calls.
> That's supposing someone will do SpaceX a favour and switch the local base stations off in large numbers. Not realistic.  

I don't think cell providers will keep antennas on unless they are asked to. That's money for power gone. Maybe even fuel given the power outages going on.

I know they may have network slices or whitelists of government users they serve, but otherwise


> 
>> 
>> Maybe it can be delivered as an app store app?
> 
> Getting e-Sims in is the easy part, getting the rest to work is the hard bit. D2C for Iran is simply a non-starter - whatever is there in terms of Dishys already dwarfs it in terms of capacity by orders of magnitude.

There are particular benefits. That you haven't considered. Like the fact the channel is enough for texting and that's enough for the activists that want it. Doesn't have to serve everyone to help everyone.

Any channel that can be text only is enough for DTC.

And it seems you have no idea that T-Mobile has Twitter and WhatsApp working. Disable video with the co-operation of the app makers allowed of they are using a particular IP range and you have a working tool for the aforementioned goals.

But they should have planned this ages ago.
> 
> Iranian Internet users do need hope, but a lot of what's circulating out there at the moment is hype and people's imagination having gone wild. A lot of that is giving false hope, and that's probably the last thing people need right now.
> 
> -- 
> ****************************************************************
> Dr. Ulrich Speidel
> 
> School of Computer Science
> 
> Room 303S.594 (City Campus)
> 
> The University of Auckland
> u.speidel@auckland.ac.nz
> http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ulrich/
> ****************************************************************
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>