Iran Manages to Block Starlink on its Territory

Iranian experts have found a way to massively block the signal of Starlink terminals in the country.

This was reported by Forbes.

The blocking mechanism turned out to be more complicated than just creating radio interference.

Iran used the so-called ‘electronic shield’ tactic, which jams the frequencies at which the terminals connect to satellites in low Earth orbit.

This approach requires a large number of special jammers placed in cities, but the result was effective – thousands of antennas across the country simply lost their connection.

Despite the fact that there are tens of thousands of Starlink terminals in Iran, the massive outage even affected satellite connections.

According to Iran Wire, large-scale outages began rapidly: at first, 30% of users experienced problems, but within a few hours the number of traffic disruptions increased to more than 80%.

At the same time, the NetBlocks monitoring group confirmed that Iran has been in an almost complete digital vacuum for more than 60 hours.

The level of network connectivity in the country has fallen to a critical level – only 1% of the usual indicators.

In fact, the state has completely cut off its citizens from the global Internet, leaving only internal resources controlled by the regime to work.

It is worth noting that such a success with jamming the signal in Iran was made possible primarily by placing obstacles directly on its own territory.

At the same time, China is already conducting simulation studies, modeling scenarios of a complete disruption of communication in Taiwan.

Chinese scientists from the Beijing Institute of Technology have developed a model that suggests creating an ‘electromagnetic shield’ over the island.

Since Starlink uses thousands of fast-moving satellites, conventional ground-based jammers are ineffective against them. Therefore, Beijing proposes to use a huge ‘swarm’ of a thousand or two thousand drones and balloons.

These devices would hover at an altitude of about 20 kilometers, creating a dense grid of obstacles that would prevent signals from satellites to ground terminals.

Although such an operation requires enormous resources and perfect synchronization, Chinese researchers believe this method is the most reliable way to isolate Taiwan from the outside world in the event of a conflict.

Earlier, Militarnyi reported that Russia is developing anti-satellite weapons aimed at the Starlink satellites of American billionaire Elon Musk.