Totally theoretically; would it be possible to create a system of satellites that a government (like Iran for example) couldn’t block access to that would allow people to get even a limited form of the internet? If so what would it look like?
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Satallites are a really fucking dumb way to deliver internet.
They are especially dumb for delivering “unstoppable” internet.
If you want to deliver unstoppable internet the key is to make it impossible to detect, you’re much better running a fiber cable, but that ofc is pretty high risk if they discover it. Alternatively you want a mesh network that can change frequencies to prevent jamming.
No. The primary way of blocking radio is by raising the noise floor across the band. The type of radio is irrelevant. The protocol is irrelevant. It is all only the electromagnetic spectrum from infrared light, to visible spectrum light, to radio light, through to xray or gamma ray light. How we divide that up into protocols, bands, and names is totally irrelevant. When transmitting radio light, we are all restricted in how much power we are allowed to send. All receiver circuits are listening for meaningful information above the noise floor. Bands are allocated to try to create spaces for certain types of communications. This controls the noise floor. Then electrical engineers design the hardware you buy to operate within this specification. If that noise floor is raised, the physical hardware is unable to retrieve information and effectively makes it useless. If you are a radio wizard and build your own transmitter that has more power, you just created a giant beacon that anyone will track easily to your location. Transmitting always reveals your exact location. In military operations, you constantly hear about some entity going radio silent. This is why. If you are a soldier, you may not carry a cell phone at all when on the job because it is constantly revealing your location. The only way to avoid this is with actually hard wire connections. You are able to use lasers for line of sight communications, but in practice, you will be limited by the optical lens focusing complexity and atmospheric distortion even from the ground with point to point regional communication. If anyone crosses the beam it will still be detected and is likely to leak some light depending on conditions and design.
Ultimately, your only real option is the sneaker net which is damn near useless in US suburbia hell. Don’t forget that the freeway system was not created for the citizenry. It is only about military mobility. That is why the Germans made the autobahn and why the USA and others had to copy the idea. Your only defense is in the democratic political space.
I’d think that there are practical limits to jamming. After all, jamming doesn’t just make radio impossible, it just makes the transmitter and receiver need to get closer together (so that their signal strength in that shorter distance is strong enough to overcome the jamming from further away). Most receivers filter out the frequencies they’re not looking for, so any jammer will need to actually be hitting that receiver with that specific frequency. And many modern antenna arrays rely on beamforming techniques less susceptible to unintentional interference or intentional jamming that is coming from a different direction than where it’s looking. Even less modern antennas can be heavily directional based on the physical design.
If you’re trying to jam a city block, with a 100m radius, of any and all frequencies that radios use, that’s gonna take some serious power. Which will require cooling equipment if you want to keep it on continuously.
If you’re trying to jam an entire city, though, that just might not be practical to hit literally every frequency that a satellite might be using.
I don’t know enough about the actual power and equipment requirements, but it seems like blocking satellite communications between satellites you don’t control and transceivers scattered throughout a large territory is more difficult than you’re making it sound.
Well there goes that idea, thanks for the detailed response.
Don’t give up! WAN links use shielding and beamforming, or even just lasers to avoid general background noise and achieve high bandwidth even in adverse conditions. Anything can be a medium for data!
Highly directional antennae can mitigate this type of jamming. Coincidentally, satellite communication also uses highly directional antennae.
It is not a laser beam.
No.
Because the way governments block access is to flood the EM spectrum with too much noise to make the service unusable.
If you have cables running to them - yes.
Sounds like a job for mesh networking.
In military systems it’s done with e.g. frequency hopping with encrypted sequences. That’s also how GPS anti-spoofing works (that’s for the military segment of GPS). The idea is say there are 1000 frequencies and you keep switching between them. Since the jammer doesn’t know which one you’re using at any moment, they have to jam all 1000 of them. So that increases their power requirements by 1000x compared to jamming just one frequency.
It’s not feasible for a mass market consumer product like Starlink. Even if it was, it would be thrown under sanctions or military suppression faster than you can say boo. And it would run at quite low bit rates to again maximize the ability to get through jamming. It would be useless for Netflix or transmitting video.
Maybe an activist cell in a place like Iran could put something together for its own members on the quiet, but it would be low bandwidth and would presumably be very dangerous for the users if they got caught. It seems likely to be that low bit rate digital ham radio modes like PSK4 or JS8CALL could get through Iran’s jamming, and the hardware is pretty accessible. But, they could use direction finding to clobber the transmitters. Low bit rate = 1 character per second, say. So you could essentially smuggle text messages out of the country, not video. Maybe if they aren’t looking, you could get a voice channel through. On the other hand, is it possible to make phone calls in or out of Iran right now? I doubt that the country would disconnect itself completely enough to stop all phone calls, but I haven’t been following the situation. I think it’s possible to even call into North Korea though.
I wonder sometimes if people overestimate the usefulness of stuff like this. Suppose Iran’s efforts to jam Starlink had failed, so Starlink still worked there. What would be different for anyone? We’d see more video getting out, but it’s not clear to me that it would have any effect other than to stoke up more internet rage. It’s unclear to me if that’s of any help any more.
Starlink was apparently believed to be unjammable until recently, when we found out that it wasn’t, fwiw.
It’s not feasible for a mass market consumer product like Starlink.
Why not? That’s a service designed to serve millions of simultaneous users from nearly 10,000 satellites. These systems have to be designed to be at least somewhat resistant to unintentional interference, which means it is usually quite resistant to intentional jamming.
Any modern RF protocol is going to use multiple frequencies, timing slots, and physical locations in three dimensional space.
And so the reports out of Iran is that Starlink service is degraded in places but not fully blocked. It’s a cat and mouse game out there.
IIRC the EU is working on one, but its still a ways out.
It already exists. See: Eutelsat https://www.eutelsat.com/satellite-services/tv-internet-home/satellite-internet-home-business-konnect
Can it be jammed? Sure. Not very easy though, especially if you are out of the big cities.
Thank you, I was not in a place where I could have looked that up easily when I threw that comment onto the interwebs.
It’s a parallel system, but everything can be blocked.
