But the jamming attempts, part of a widespread internet shutdown designed to quash civil unrest, are failing.

According to sources closely monitoring the uprising that started in the final days of 2025, ignited by worsening economic conditions, tens of thousands of people are still able to connect to the constellation to communicate with others inside the country and with the outside world. They do so while risking their lives and freedom, as the use of Starlink is considered espionage in Iran and punishable by lengthy prison sentences or death. 

The situation is a testament to the resiliency of Starlink, which has been put to the test and strengthened through years of its deployment on Ukrainian battlefields. It is also a reminder of how critical the mega-constellation, controlled by the world’s richest man, has become to countries in geopolitical turmoil.

So what role is Starlink playing in the bloody protests against Iran’s Islamic ruling elite, and how has SpaceX managed to circumvent those jamming attempts?

Starlink is not officially available in Iran.

The government, commanded by the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has never licensed it. But in 2022, during the months-long wave of protests that swept the country after 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died in police custody, Elon Musk announced on Twitter that Starlink internet had been made available. Amini, a university student, had been arrested by Iran’s moral police in the capital Tehran for allegedly not properly wearing her hijab. Her death, attributed to police brutality, sparked a powerful revolt against Iran’s totalitarian regime not seen in decades. 

At that time, Iran’s government had done what it did again on January 8th of this year; that is, shut down the internet to prevent protesters from self-organizing and sending messages abroad.

“This was purely SpaceX’s decision,” Volodymyr Stepanets, a Ukrainian satellite expert who has served as an advisor to the Ukrainian military helping troops connect to Starlink, tells Supercluster “It is not official. 
You can’t find any official documentation about it apart from a post on X or Twitter."

Stepanets claims that although SpaceX can disable its satellite internet beams above certain regions – as it reportedly does above Russia and China – it can allow service availability regardless of approved licenses. Then, anyone within that territory with a Starlink terminal can connect to the constellation by switching on the roaming settings.

But to be able to do that in Iran, locals have to get their hands on those terminals first, which have never been officially sold and distributed in the country.

Because the Iranian government cannot completely control and shut down Starlink, it simply forbids its use, Clemence Poirier, a space cyber security researcher at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, tells Supercluster. Locals must smuggle the terminals into the country, facing prison time if caught, she adds.

Selling on the black market for over $1,000 per device, according to Bloomberg, the terminals are costly for common Iranians, who earn on average around $500 per month. To split the cost, local tech whizzes turn the terminals into internet mini-hubs and share access with others in the community. They frequently hide them on rooftops to minimize the risk of being found out. But that’s not always enough.

“These terminals emit electromagnetic spectrum and can be detected and targeted or seized by the regime,” says Poirier. “Considering that it gives access to the World Wide Web without the censorship and surveillance systems of Iranian terrestrial [internet service providers], it is a big issue for the regime, which tries to track [the terminals] down.”

On January 20th, reports emerged that fourteen young protesters had been arrested in a raid of a villa just outside Tehran, where they gathered to access Starlink internet.

Iranian authorities recently began flying drones over dwellings in search of the illegal satellite terminals.

But despite the severe punishments, tens of thousands of terminals have been illegally brought into the country, mostly through the United Arab Emirates, Iraqi Kurdistan, Armenia, and Afghanistan, according to the New York Times. Iranian expats in the West have been trying to help with the effort by setting up crowdfunding campaigns to buy more Starlink terminals for Iranians.

“If you have a situation like in Iran, with protests against a regime, which is attempting to control other sources of information, if you have a means of independently accessing the internet within the country, that allows you to effectively bypass those forms of control that the regime is using,” Thomas Withington, an associate fellow in military science at the The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) defense think tank, tells Supercluster. “So, a satellite communications terminal like Starlink becomes very valuable to the protestors in Iran to understand not only what’s happening in the outside world, but also to communicate with each other.”

Iranian authorities have known about the budding illegal telecoms network even before it was used to leak images and videos testifying to the brutality of the crackdown against the protests, which erupted in late December in response to the worsening economic situation in the country. Despite the internet shutdown imposed on January 8th, videos capturing rows of body bags and distraught relatives searching for loved ones have reached the world, revealing the unspeakable horror of the government’s actions. 

Some estimates state that over 16,000 people may have been killed by the government forces and a further 330,000 injured, according to the Times.

To prevent the evidence from getting out, Iranian authorities are making attempts to jam Starlink. 

In fact, they had previously tried to stop the illegal service during the twelve-day war with Israel in June 2025, according to Poirier, when they appealed to the International Telecommunication Union to ban the “unauthorized transmissions.” The U.S. delegation to the ITU at that time took the stance that the situation is a problem of Iranian border control, and outside the scope of the ITU, says Poirier.

Reports of attempts to jam Starlink signals in Iran first occurred only a couple of days after the widespread internet shutdown started in early January. These reports came from Amir Rashidi, the Director of Digital Rights at the human rights charity Miaan Group, who spoke to the Guardian on January 10th, describing reports of severely eroded Starlink connectivity.

Withington says that the Iranian government likely attempted to disrupt Starlink reception by jamming the signal from the Global Positioning System (GPS), which the terminals need to connect to the satellites. 

“The terminal needs to know the whereabouts of where on the Earth it is located, and that then allows the terminal to determine which satellite it’s going to communicate with,” Withington says. “GPS is a very good way of doing that. The terminal also needs a source of accurate time to be able to synchronize with the satellite when they talk to each other. GPS is used as a standard timing source for that.”

But Stepanets says that attempts to disrupt Starlink services through GPS jamming and spoofing (overriding the original positioning, navigation, and timing signal with a stronger one carrying incorrect information) are well known to SpaceX. 

The constellation’s operator has faced GPS jamming since the terminals were first dispatched to the battlefields of Ukraine in 2022. To overcome the widespread GPS signal disruption along the frontline, which both sides in the war are relying on to confuse the enemy’s drones and missiles, Starlink engineers developed an innovative positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) system that relies on the satellites’ own Ku band signals. 

Stepanets says that users need to install new firmware on the terminals to take advantage of the alternative system, but that Ukrainians have seen “good results” from the Starlink native PNT. 

“This solution provides good resistance to any electronic warfare,” he says. “After the software update, the terminal has a good resistance to jamming and can work more effectively.”

He believes that available reports suggest that users in Iran, too, are now benefitting from the war-proven anti-jamming solution.

“I believe that SpaceX is using Starlink PNT as a primary service for Starlink terminals in Iran now, and these provide a possibility for a resilient network,” he says. 

In fact, Rashidi himself later posted on LinkedIn that despite the jamming attempts, Starlink was still operational in Iran.

Jamming Starlink signals directly, Withington explains, is complicated due to the nature of the Starlink beams.

“Starlink uses very high-frequency signals that form very narrow beams,” Withington says. “These beams are very sharp and focused, and that makes it very difficult to jam them because you have to direct the jamming signal directly into the Starlink antenna. So you need to know where that antenna is, you have to be very close and have enough jamming power to direct that into the antenna.”

Stepanets says that Russia occasionally attempts to disrupt Starlink signals in Ukraine using what he described as very large and costly specialized jammers, but has achieved only very limited results. He believes that other space-born internet-beaming constellations will be similarly robust.

“They can cause a bit of disruption but certainly not break Starlink communication,” he says. “Neither on the battlefields in Ukraine, nor anywhere else, has anyone yet demonstrated even any noticeable success in suppressing low Earth orbit satellite networks.”

He adds that, as those jammers need to be located very close to the terminals they seek to disrupt, they can be easily found and destroyed. 

“It can only affect a very limited area, like a zone ten kilometers in diameter,” he says.

Stepanets, who runs a website called the Skylinker, where he shares information about the strategic use of Starlink in conflict situations, says that during his research, he found no confirmation that similar systems have been deployed in Iran. He thinks that available information suggests that Starlink disruption is limited and localized in Iran, mostly affecting key hubs in Tehran and other major cities. 

“The Starlink PNT is a technology that provides really strong resiliency,” he says. “It’s a game-changer. Countries like Russia, Iran, and others have a lot of experience manipulating and jamming GPS (and other Global navigation satellite systems’) signals. They have spent a lot of resources developing and manufacturing these systems. But Starlink, for now, generally, in Ukraine and Iran, provides a resilient service.”

But other concerns remain about the role the constellation, currently consisting of over 9,400 satellites, plays in securing connectivity in conflict zones.

Since January 13th 2026, Starlink services have been available to users in Iran free of charge. 

Elon Musk has repeatedly expressed his support for the Iranian uprising. But he used to be similarly enthusiastic about Starlink’s use in Ukraine. As the war dragged on, however, his sympathy for the Ukrainian struggle cooled for several reasons. The Trump administration used the threat of discontinuing Starlink access to push Zelensky’s government toward the notorious minerals deal last spring.

At the moment, no other space-based system can offer an alternative to Starlink. The OneWeb constellation, consisting of around 650 satellites, offers only a fraction of Starlink’s available bandwidth, and its terminals are much more clunky and difficult to set up. Amazon’s LEO constellation, formerly known as Project Kuiper, has only recently begun launching.

“Starlink has been very important in Ukraine, and it’s appearing to be very important in Iran as well,” says Withington. “There is a case to be made that supernational organizations, like the European Union, should have their own alternative to Starlink. Firstly, as a sovereign resource, so that we don’t need to be relying on a third party for that, but also globally to provide an alternative should a private actor like Elon Musk decide to switch the system off in the future.”