by Shehzadi NAJAF
For years, Starlink sold itself on a simple promise. Wherever you were, whatever your government was trying to shut off, a dish pointed at the sky could still get you online. That promise took a serious hit in January 2026, when Iranian authorities imposed a nationwide digital blackout during a wave of protests and reportedly succeeded in disrupting Starlink service through a combination of GPS spoofing, signal jamming, and physical interference. Researchers tracking the episode called it a watershed moment. The system marketed as unblockable had, for a time, been blocked.
It is worth pausing on why this matters beyond Iran. Over the past five years, satellite internet has quietly become one of the main ways the world is closing its remaining connectivity gaps. Starlink alone now serves more than ten million active customers across 160 countries, reaching villages, ships, and disaster zones that fiber and cell towers never will. For a lot of people, especially in places where ground infrastructure is thin, weak, or deliberately switched off, a satellite dish is not a convenience. It is the only connection they have.
That is exactly what makes jamming it such a serious problem. Engineers researching the Iran episode describe a kind of kill chain with three parts working together. First comes GPS spoofing, which feeds a terminal false coordinates so it cannot calculate where to point itself at the sky. Then comes saturation of the Ku band frequencies the terminals actually use to talk to satellites, essentially drowning the real signal in noise. Finally, in some documented cases, comes physical targeting of the hardware itself. None of these three methods is new on its own. What is new is seeing them deployed together, deliberately, against a civilian internet service during a political crisis.
Academic researchers building anti jamming systems for these constellations have noted a structural problem that makes this worse. Low earth orbit satellites fly on predictable, well known paths and expose a large, easily targeted signal footprint, which is precisely what makes them acutely vulnerable to deliberate jamming. A jammer does not need to hit a moving target blind. It just needs to know where the satellite is scheduled to be, because that information is, by design, public.
This is not confined to active war zones or authoritarian crackdowns either. A navigation satellite called Pulsar 0, launched specifically to map interference from orbit, found something its own operators did not expect. According to the company behind it, the satellite detected GPS signal disruption stretching continuously from France in the west to the borders of Pakistan in the east, far more extensive than engineers had assumed going in. Jamming, in other words, is not an occasional battlefield tactic anymore. It is becoming a kind of background noise across an enormous stretch of the connected world, and satellites built for ordinary broadband happen to fly directly through it.
Governments have clearly noticed, and their response tells its own story. The European Union has committed roughly 10.6 billion euros to build IRIS², a 290 satellite constellation explicitly designed to give European governments encrypted communications and connectivity that cannot be denied or degraded by a foreign actor, with officials describing it openly as a matter of technological sovereignty rather than simply broadband coverage. China is pursuing the same logic from the other direction, building its own Guowang and Qianfan mega constellations toward a combined total of roughly thirteen thousand satellites as part of a stated push for digital self sufficiency. Neither project is primarily about giving more people internet access. Both are about not having to depend on somebody else’s satellites when the relationship with that somebody else turns sour.
That is the real story underneath the jamming headlines. Orbit is becoming the next contested layer of global connectivity, following the same path that undersea cables walked before it. First a technology promises to connect the whole planet on equal terms. Then a handful of states realize that whoever controls or can disrupt that technology holds real leverage over everyone else who depends on it. Then those states start building their own version rather than trusting someone else’s, and connectivity quietly turns into a competition for control rather than a shared public good.
Here is the uncomfortable part for countries that are not building their own constellation. There is currently no binding international framework that treats deliberate jamming of civilian satellite internet the way the world treats, say, interference with civil aviation or maritime navigation. A government or an armed group with the right equipment can disrupt connectivity for an entire region with very little international consequence, because the legal category barely exists yet. For countries in South Asia, the Middle East, and parts of Africa that increasingly rely on satellite links precisely because their ground infrastructure is weak, that gap is not an abstract legal footnote. It is a live exposure.
None of this means satellite internet should be abandoned or distrusted. If anything, the opposite is true. It remains one of the few realistic ways to bring connectivity to places fiber will likely never reach. But treating it as unblockable was always a marketing claim rather than an engineering fact, and the world has now watched that claim fail in public. Before more of the Global South becomes dependent on constellations it does not own and cannot defend, there needs to be a serious conversation, at the United Nations or through bodies like the International Telecommunication Union, about what protecting civilian satellite connectivity should actually mean in practice. The sky connected the world faster than almost anyone expected. It is time to start treating it like the contested infrastructure it has become, rather than the neutral one it was sold as.
