It's a good article for people who got so used to the internet permeating everything that they never considered the underlying infrastructure. But it's there, and it can be controled - not just in Iran; though certainly countries like Iran and Russia put more effort into isolating it than others. But it will never be 100% - circumvention will always be possible - and I don't mean VPNs, just other physical/technical means of accessing & distributing the internet and/or other forms of ditributed messaging. As a layman's guess I'd say cell towers might factor into this.

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The article suggests the only way to avoid government shutdowns is through satellite internet which makes Starlink a lot more valuable.

Ham Radios

it is far easier to just shut down local peering center and transit for major providers. far less moving elements to take care of than cell towers, which would not even address the whole problem ("problem" from the government's point of view)

You misunderestood; I guessed that cell towers could be helpful in circumventing such shutdowns.
I edited my previous comment to make that a little clearer.

Stock traders use shortwave radio to transmit digital data. Over long distances it's apparently faster than the internet.

So yeah, there are always options.

oh, then i did misunderstood, but i still don't see what you are suggesting. maybe if you get assigned address you can have some limited p2p communication with nearby people, but if that is the case, a guy with a megaphone does similar job.

buzzer noise

Sat links are a way to avoid that... if you assume they are not cooperative with the government doing the shutdown.

Which is basically a very stupid assumption in a whole lot of scenarios.

Actual alternative:

Build a community meshnet of your own transceiver devices, and/or use I2P.

It'd be some work to setup, and probably be pretty slow, but this would at least enable local communication, and if you're using I2P, it'd also be secure and private.

At the moment, Starlink in Iran can only do local sms text messages, that's it, no web access, no voicecalls, no signal nor whatsapp nor telegram.

And your phone has to already be carrier unlocked.

Or, you have to have an actual Starlink DishyMcDishFace reciever or w/e ... which are contraband in Iran. As in, do not pass go, go directly to jail, potentially do not ever come out.

Also, Elon can just rail a line of ketamine and suddenly change his mind for no apparent reason.

Whereas a local meshnet does not have a single point of failure, and actually supports many more kinds of internet traffic, and Elon isn't reading all your SMS and metadata... as well it being possible to hook into any kind of potential tunnel to the broader internet.

Cuba does this to some extent, though I don't think it's internet connected. They do share contraband media smuggled in on SD cards.

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Probably easier to do rather than laying your line through different jurisdictions and plots of someone's property.

I mean, carrier pigeons sd cards or thumb drives being moved by motorbike is actually a reasonable way to move a lot of data, in one chunk, fairly fast, in poor infrastructure environments, given how insanely space dense storage memory is now... but yeah thats not gonna work for lots of little bits of data moving to many places, very fast.

Thats what 4G, 5G, other radio frequencies that work well enough for data transfer are for.

Like, I am posting this from a phone that is WiFi connected to a 5G base station tower, because my building is too shit to even have a working cable line.

120 mbs down, not blazing fast, but more than enough to stream 720p/1080p 60fps video, latency is actually low enough to stand a chance at an online competetive game.

FCC regulations not withstanding... you could concievably just jerry rig this thing to directly talk with other same base stations, instead of or as well as the tower its actually connected to.

If there aren't already people out there somewhere making rough analogues to a 5G internet base station, that can talk to each other as basically dedicated local mesh routers... out of rasberry pi's or something... I'd be shocked.

Fuck, you could blast a HAM or CB radio with 56k dialup protocol, and some kind of extra redundancy/signal noise processor.

Again, laws against this notwithstanding... thats absolutely possible to do.

Ham Radios

ABSOLUTELY HARAM

On the other hand Meshtastic nodes can be solar powered and independent. You can easily build a big-ish mesh with a couple hundred western monetary units.

It also uses common frequencies with every single wireless weather display and garage door opener and wireless outlet.

Also HAM operators are required to not encrypt their traffic and are licensed/registered, thus easily found and their equipment taken away.

Neither is perfect tho

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But Elon shut off Starlink to Ukraine at the worst time… he can do it to you too.

Aren’t most cell tower functions just backhauled to the Internet these days, anyway?

Licensing and encryption controls again, do not apply in authoritarian countries. You are already breaking the law by circumventing the communications blackout.