An important factor to consider when answering this question, is that the average monthly wage in Iran is only $200 to $500 USD/month.
Why it is important?
I guess because a single Starlink subscription would be 30-80% of their monthly income.
Ask HN: Iran's 120h internet shutdown, phones back. How to stay resilient?
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Re: Ask HN: Iran's 120h internet shutdown, phones back. How to stay resilient?
#42HAM radio is your best option.
We need a communication method that even fools can use.
That way, we might end up with enough nodes such that mesh networking comes within reach.
Re: Ask HN: Iran's 120h internet shutdown, phones back. How to stay resilient?
#43Old fashioned phone trees can be really useful IMHO OP. We used them when I worked in a school. If there was winter weather, you'd call say, everyone with a last name from A to G in the staff directory, someone else calls G to K, and so on and so forth. You can combine the phone tree with literal runners -- so basically, someone takes their burner and calls suburbs A,B,C and D and then the runners go out and pass the…
Radio stations too. The US civil rights movement sometimes used radio DJs to call people out for protests.
"Stay tuned boppers, stay tuned."
Re: Ask HN: Iran's 120h internet shutdown, phones back. How to stay resilient?
#44Re: Ask HN: Iran's 120h internet shutdown, phones back. How to stay resilient?
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why it is important?
I guess because a single Starlink subscription would be 30-80% of their monthly income.
I guess that's the strength of mesh networks. Benn Jordan recently showed how to build one disguised as a lawn light for less than $40. BitChat works with tech people already have as well
Re: Ask HN: Iran's 120h internet shutdown, phones back. How to stay resilient?
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess because a single Starlink subscription would be 30-80% of their monthly income.
It has been reported in the press that Starlink subscription fee has been waived for Iran, so people with receivers can use it for free.
Pretty sure the cheapest receiver you can buy is still $600
Re: Ask HN: Iran's 120h internet shutdown, phones back. How to stay resilient?
#47If the phones are working, 56k modem.
If you’re using the circuit-switched mobile phone calls it’s unlikely you will be able to negotiate that; GSM compression is optimised for voice and not data.
If you have a phone or cellular dongle with a serial interface you might be able to initiate a “data” call which gives you a modem-like link at speeds much higher than running an actual modem on the audio path. Note that this kind of non-standard usage will stand out like a sore thumb so might not be advisable.
Re: Ask HN: Iran's 120h internet shutdown, phones back. How to stay resilient?
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
The LoRa enthusiasts in my area seem to all have moved to Meshcore, largely because of a quirk in Meshtastic's routing algorithm that doesn't handle nodes with widely varying visibility/power/noisefloor well. They report regularly getting traffic hundreds of miles. There might be a couple mountaintop repeaters in the mesh though. For OP's situation I think runners and a store and forward system like Scuttlebutt/Briar…
I’ve tried MeshCore as well and discovered zero nodes. At least what I’ve seen it looks like Meshtastic implemented the same routing fixes MeshCore has. I think the issue is more that getting a message many kilometres out using a couple of nodes sitting in non prime locations is just unreliable. The noise is too high. There’s also a limit on how many messages can be sent while using flood routing.
But did all the nodes and repeaters update to the version of meshtastic with routing? Meshcore started with routing out of the box.
I don't think it's the noise that's too high, my original understanding of the meshtastic 2.0 protocol (from this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7v6UbC5blJU) was that an edge device would receive priority. So the message might go the wrong direction, say. Or, worse, a meshtastic radio in a basement might get priority.
Because they didn't understand (or care about) network topologies from the start and reliable message transmission, not to mention the versions of devices that are still on their network, I'm guessing it's gonna be a couple more years before they finally get their act together.
Re: Ask HN: Iran's 120h internet shutdown, phones back. How to stay resilient?
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess because a single Starlink subscription would be 30-80% of their monthly income.
It has been reported in the press that Starlink subscription fee has been waived for Iran, so people with receivers can use it for free.
yah but not sure how someone in Iran can actually get the hardware shipped to them (I just tried Tehran as delivery, and starlink website said "no"), and also would need a bank or credit card from a non-sanctioned country to be able to actually pay for it
Re: Ask HN: Iran's 120h internet shutdown, phones back. How to stay resilient?
#50HAM radio is your best option.
Isn't one of the problems is that to get appreciable range you have to have a fairly obvious antenna setup?
~5m antenna during the day, 10m at night for a simple dipole antenna
I'd be more worried about them being able to triangulate the radio signals though. If they can jam GPS, surely they can detect a 100W signal around 14MHz.