[Starlink] Re: Starlink and Iran

[Ulrich Speidel <u.speidel@auckland.ac.nz>]

On 15/01/2026 11:06 pm, Inemesit Affia wrote:
>
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> 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.

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.
>
> 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.

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.

-- 
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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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