An ecosystem of smuggled tech holds Iran’s last link to the outside world

Original article by Aisha Down

For most of Iran, the internet was shut off on Thursday afternoon – the most severe blackout the country has seen in years of internet shutdowns, coming after days of escalating anti-government protests.

For a very small sliver of the country, it is still possible to get photos and videos to the outside world, and even to make calls. The Telegram channel Vahid Online on Monday posted photos of dead bodies lying next to a street in Kahrizak, on the southern outskirts of Tehran; on Sunday, it shared a video of Iranians chanting “death to Khamenei” at a funeral.

Some of these videos and messages are transmitted through an ecosystem of online tools designed to bypass censorship – among them Telegram proxies, a decentralised messaging service called Delta Chat, and a browser called Ceno, said Amir Rashidi, an Iranian digital rights expert.

By far the most significant part of this system are Starlink terminals, which connect to the internet via thousands of satellites in low-Earth orbit, and have been smuggled into Iran en masse over the past two years. Those who are using them risk their lives.

There are about 50,000 Starlink terminals now in Iran, said Rashidi; other reports put this number at up to 100,000. The users of the service – which is part of Elon Musk’s SpaceX – are a tiny fraction of Iran’s overall population of more than 90 million people.

While multiple people – even a whole apartment block – might be able to connect to the internet via a single Starlink terminal, the number of total users in the entire country is at most in the hundreds of thousands, said Doug Madory, the director of internet analysis at Kentik, a network observability and intelligence platform.

They hold Iran’s last tenuous link to the outside world. Very little information, at least electronically, appears to be leaving the country, except for minimal traffic from businesses and individuals whitelisted by the regime.

Across Iran, authorities are hunting for Starlink terminals – jamming whole neighbourhoods using tools developed for electronic warfare, and flying drones over rooftops to search for telltale satellite dishes, say sources. Under a law passed in 2025, possessing a Starlink terminal in Iran can be interpreted as espionage for Israel and is punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

“They have basically criminalised Starlink to the extent that they’re saying in the law [that] if you use Starlink it’s the equivalent of conducting espionage operations for Israel and the American CIA,” said Rashidi.

It is unclear how many terminals are still operating, and how many have been confiscated, he added.

The tools Iran appears to be using to jam the terminals are military-grade, similar to those used to jam drones on the frontlines of Ukraine, said Rashidi. They are expensive and energy-intensive, capable of knocking out a certain radio frequency within a given area, but can only be used locally and cannot blanket the country.

“It’s not cheap. It’s something you’d find in a military arsenal, and there’s only a few types of suppliers,” said Madory.

For now, the few who have smuggled Starlink terminals can connect online, although in neighbourhoods with heavy jamming it is nearly impossible to do more than send messages. The tech-savvy among them are using VPNs to disguise their presence; others are simply hauling their terminals from place to place to avoid detection.

While Starlink users can communicate for now, Iran could choose – though it would be difficult – to track them down.

“Depending on how much effort the Iranian government wanted to put into it, they could trace the signals that use the particular frequency those terminals have to use,” said Madory. “You’re kind of announcing yourself.”

For those without a terminal, an announcement on a state-linked Telegram channel has given a preview to the potential future of the internet in Iran. The IRIB news agency yesterday published a list of all internet sites that would now be available in Iran.

These included domestic search engines, domestic maps and navigation services, domestic messaging apps, and even a domestic streaming service – an Iranian version of Netflix, said Rashidi, with only government-approved videos.

All of these sites are part of Iran’s effort to create a national internet, said Rashidi: a skeleton version of the web that is significantly more restricted than even China’s, managed by the government and virtually unconnected to the outside world. That effort has been under way since the Rouhani administration, and now appears to be working, he said.

What this could mean, said Madory and Rashidi, is that Iran’s internet as it was may not come back.

“There are rumours,” said Rashidi. “Some people are saying that if things go back normal, there won’t be the internet. There will be only the national internet.”

“They’re gearing up for the long run, for this to be the way things are for an extended period of time,” said Madory.