ORBITING ASSETS, FALLING LOGIC

IN mid-January 2026, during the anti-government uprising in Tran, Starlink waived its monthly subscription payments for users in Iran after the imamocracy blacked out the internet.

- KAJAL BASU

Mahsa Alimardani, technospecialist at the human rights organisation Witness, told CNN, “Estimates say there are around 50,000 Starlink receivers in Iran.”Here’s why the maths is shot: 50,000 terminals served a population of 9.2 crore, 80 percent of which are net-connected via 15.1 crore cellphones. Since one Starlink terminal can work 128-235 phones simultaneously, Starlink was servicing between 64 lakh and 1.1 crore devices. That’s around 4-8 percent of all phones in the country. A few days later, the world’s media reported extensively on the internet lockdown: Starlink terminals were estimated at up to 100,000. Suddenly confident stats about Starlink’s reach began flooding the information market.

Starlink has never had a licence to operate in Iran, although thousands of its terminals have been smuggled into the country since 2022, when President Joe Biden permitted US companies to bypass sanctions. All this busy aerial connectivity was underground. Like every other internet service provider, Starlink knows exactly how many paid subscribers it has in Tran, but its profits lie in keeping quiet.