[Starlink] Re: Starlink and Iran

Ulrich Speidel
2026-01-15T10:31:06Z

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.

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.

--
****************************************************************
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/
****************************************************************