Equipment for SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet system is being successfully smuggled into Iran in an attempt to help local residents bypass the country’s ongoing internet crackdown.
Photos and videos of the Starlink equipment in Iran—which can receive uncensored broadband from orbiting satellites—have been appearing on social media.
Karim Sadjadpour, an Iranian expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, tweeted out one such video, which shows an anonymous activist group preparing to smuggle numerous Starlink dishes to the country. According to him, the unnamed activist group has “already sent dozens” of dishes to Iran and plans on scaling up.
“These efforts are still very nascent, but they have evidence the terminals are working and claim they're taking extra precautions to lessen the risks to users,” he added. “Videos have also begun trickling out of Starlink terminals being used inside the country.”
Iranian-American Firouz Naderi, a former director at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, has also been tweeting about anonymous groups sending Starlink dishes to the country. According to him, about 30 dishes arrived in the country last week. All of them were bought through the Starlink RV tier, which can be ordered without going through a waitlist and used in multiple different locations.
The Starlink equipment needs to be smuggled in since the Iranian government will almost certainly confiscate any units it can find. The same Starlink hardware can bypass the country’s strict online censorship by receiving unfiltered high-speed broadband over SpaceX’s own satellite network.
Each Starlink dish can only provide uncensored internet access for a cluster of neighboring users through its Wi-Fi router. So a massive number of dishes will be needed to serve large swaths of the Iranian public.
Sadjadpour added: “Many folks-including prominent Iranian-American tech entrepreneurs-have been engaged on this issue. One told me they are keen on scaling to several thousand terminals in the next six months.”
CNN also reports that the White House is in talks with SpaceX about bringing Starlink to Iran, a month after the company activated the satellite internet service in the Middle Eastern country. “We are interested in finding ways to ensure that the Iranian people can have access to the internet on their phones and everywhere else,” one senior administration official told CNN. “And so Starlink is one option, but it is not the only option.”