tarlink receivers have begun to arrive inside Iran, smuggled into the country in hopes of providing a backup internet should the Iranian regime shut down the country’s existing system. Starlink, operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, is a global network of low-orbit satellites that bypasses the terrestrial internet, and helped restore connectivity in Ukraine after the Russian invasion. Musk activated the satellites over Iran in September, after the U.S. government cleared the way for American tech companies to operate there in support of a wave of protests.
The arrival of the first dishes inside the Islamic Republic was confirmed to TIME on Friday by an activist working on the project from the United States. A video snippet circulating on social media earlier in the day showed a Starlink receiver searching for signal on a rooftop said to be in Tehran. The activist, who asked not to be identified for security reasons, declined to say how many of the devices were now in the country.
“It’s safer not to say anything about the numbers. I don’t want them to know what to look for, the scale,” he said, referring to Iran’s security services. “Let them wonder.”
If Ukraine is any guide, however, establishing a “replacement internet” will require at least several thousand of the compact, rooftop receivers. The goal is twofold—to allow protestors to communicate among themselves, and to ensure that the world continues to have a window on the confrontation with a theocratic regime with a history of brutally putting down peaceful protests, especially when it can do so unseen. In 2019, Iranian authorities almost completely shut down the internet for a week while the country’s security forces used live fire to end a wave of spontaneous protests after a fuel price hike.
More than 200 people, a tenth of them children, already have been killed by Iranian security in the current protests, according to human rights groups. The protests were sparked by outrage over the Sept. 16 death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini while in custody of the regime’s “morality police.” In the month since, the internet has been cut off for much of the day in Tehran and other population centers, Instagram has been shut down, and remaining platforms heavily filtered. A prominent activist inside the country has called access to Starlink “incredibly important.”
On a practical level, the effort to bring Starlink to Iran is both simple and dangerously complex. Activating the satellites to deliver the internet was a matter of flipping a switch. But to get to those Iranian rooftops, the dishes equipped to receive the signal must penetrate a heavily guarded border and, once set up, elude detection by authorities. The U.S. activist said that’s a problem. “Starlinks are not ready for countries with hostile governments,” he said. “The company needs to do more to make them more practical and safer for people who live in these countries.” He declined to offer details.