Starlink has stopped working in Iran with China's assistance. After up to 80% of terminals in the country went out of service, reports emerged about China's involvement in blocking the satellite internet.
As reported by "Hvylia," Iranian journalist Pourya Zeraati announced this on social media platform X.
Essentially, Russia provided the equipment, and China published the instructions. The Starlink outage in Iran proved that this method works. Before these events, there was a widespread belief that low Earth orbit satellites were not susceptible to jamming, and Starlink signals were protected because they constantly change frequencies and move. This claim has now come under serious scrutiny.
Notably, SpaceX modified its software in Ukraine to protect against Russian interference, but this time the problem apparently lies in the hardware.
Two months ago, Chinese researchers announced they had found a solution to disable Starlink over Taiwan. This involves 935 coherent ground-based jammers operating across Ku-band frequencies.
Now it appears that Iran has effectively become a testing ground. Currently, forty thousand terminals in the country are almost completely paralyzed, blocking information about what's happening inside the state. China, meanwhile, is checking how useful their research on the Starlink problem has been and what they still need to work on.