Starlink fears grip Iran regime: Has satellite internet become new battlefield?

In the weekslong nationwide protests, Iran’s theocratic regime has been facing the fury of people disillusioned by the Islamic Revolution’s unfulfilled promises. The economic unrest has threatened the legitimacy of the Ayatollah rule, and has also cracked open its iron door, giving its regional and Western rivals a foothold to test the regime’s supremacy.

Along with this has come a technological challenge — the threat of mounting a cyber-offensive with debilitating effect.

As Iran’s rulers unleashed a brutal crackdown on protests, they imposed a complete communication shutdown — no internet or phone connectivity.

But satellite internet provided by the likes of Elon Musk’s Starlink can easily bypass government restrictions because it does not rely on physical infrastructure inside the country as fibre or cellular internet-providers do. This limits the government’s ability to enforce a shutdown.

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With US President Donald Trump throwing his weight behind protesters, Iranian activists abroad reported that Musk’s Starlink had made satellite internet free for users inside Iran. Although Starlink is banned in the country, thousands of terminals have been smuggled in over the years and have often served as Iranians’ last tool of connectivity with the world during crackdowns. This time, however, Iran mounted an unprecedented cyber-offensive.

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As in other conflict zones, Musk-owned Starlink emerged in Iran as an instrument of hard power.

A day after Trump said he would talk to Musk about making Starlink available in Iran, SpaceX waived the subscription fee for Iranians so they could access the internet for free, Ahmad Ahmadian, Executive Director of Holistic Resilience — which works with Iranians to secure internet access — told Bloomberg.

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But military-grade jamming targeted Starlink’s internet signals, disrupting around 30 per cent of its uplink and downlink traffic in the early hours, which later rose to more than 80 per cent at one point, internet researcher Amir Rashidi told IranWire.

Rashidi said he had never witnessed such interference in his 20 years of research and noted that the technology involved is highly sophisticated and military-grade and was likely supplied by Russia or China if not developed domestically.

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Even with the full powers of the state at its disposal, Iran could not enforce a complete ban. People inside the country still managed to share videos of protests, accounts of the crackdown, and estimates of the death toll.

Despite the cyber-offensive, Reuters reported that Starlink continued to work in several pockets of the country, particularly in border areas. A source said they were personally aware of dozens of people using Starlink inside Iran.

Similarly, Alp Toker, founder of internet watchdog NetBlocks, said there remained some access to Starlink, adding that “it is patchy but still there”.

‘Completely blocking satellite internet nearly impossible’

While it is certainly possible to block satellite internet in a specific area, it is nearly impossible to block it across an entire country, Ashwin Prasad, a researcher with the Takshashila Institution’s High-Tech Geopolitics Programme, told Firstpost.

In theory, however, it is possible to extend such a blockade to the entire country but it had not been done anywhere yet.

“A ground jammer has a limited line of sight. To cover a whole country, you would need thousands of them. An airborne mesh of drones or balloons could theoretically cover a whole island like Taiwan though it hasn’t been done yet,” said Prasad.

In Iran and elsewhere, authorities can block satellite internet by targeting either GPS signals or internet signals. Blocking GPS signals is much easier.

A satellite internet terminal on the ground, such as those used by Starlink, does not need GPS to access the internet itself, but it does need GPS to lock on to the fast-moving satellites in low-earth orbit that beam the internet downwards.

By overpowering GPS signals with noise, authorities can prevent terminals from determining their true location and receiving the GPS signals needed to identify which satellite to connect to.

But this requires extremely powerful transmitters and is highly localised and limited to specific neighbourhoods or at most a single city, said Prasad.

“The nationwide implementation of such a shutdown from jamming is nearly impossible because of the sheer number of transmitters and the power it would take. Moreover, most authorities do not look for blanket shutdowns but opt for localised shutdowns, such as in conflict zones or in neighbourhoods where protests are intense,” Prasad told Firstpost.

Moreover, in the cat and mouse game between internet-providers and regimes like Iran, Starlink has now pushed an update that makes such jamming hard. While Starlink terminals prefer GPS for fast setup, SpaceX pushed a firmware update after Russian jamming in Ukraine that allows terminals to use ‘Doppler shift’ or satellite triangulation to find their location even if GPS is totally jammed. As a result, Iran has resorted to spoofing GPS signals — another way to jam internet.

GPS spoofing refers to broadcasting fake signals instead of blocking real ones. It confuses Starlink terminals.

Prasad said that GPS spoofing can degrade performance but it does not completely kill the connection anymore. He said that terminals can often “fight through” it albeit with slower speeds.

In a third method, authorities can target the internet signals directly in what is known as ‘noise jamming’. It involves overwhelming the signal. In this approach, authorities transmit powerful radio noise in the same frequency bands the satellite link uses.

In simple terms, it is like running a jet engine next to people trying to have a conversation. With the noise, they cannot hear each other.

But Prasad said that this type of jamming is much harder.

“It is much harder than GPS jamming because Starlink uses phased array antennas that create a very tight, directional beam like a laser pointer between the terminal and the satellite. To jam this, you need the noise to be exactly in the path of the beam. Since the satellite moves across the sky in minutes, the jammer effectively has to be everywhere to block it consistently. This also confirms why nationwide jamming is so hard,” said Prasad.

For such reasons, localised jamming of satellite internet has been observed in Iran but a nationwide shutdown has not been possible.

Prasad said that there have been previous instances of localised jamming elsewhere, such as in the war in Ukraine where Russia has attempted to block satellite internet and has reportedly succeeded in disrupting it in certain frontline pockets but has not been able to shut it down across Ukraine.

“This shows the limitations of both satellite internet-providers and the authorities trying to block them. In the ongoing war, it means that neither is satellite internet a magic bullet nor is blocking it absolute. Realistically, authorities can only identify hotspots of satellite internet activity or sensitive areas and block satellite internet there. A nationwide shutdown would be nearly impossible,” said Prasad.