by Shanaka Anslem Perra at Substack
How Iran’s Electromagnetic Siege of Starlink Revealed the Mathematical Threshold Where Autocracy Breaks, and Why the $2 Trillion Repricing of Space Assets Has Already Begun
The most important number in geopolitics right now is not a death toll, a missile count, or a sanctions figure.
It is 1.3 kilobits per second.
That is the bandwidth required to transmit the message that brought eighty-five million Iranians to their windows at exactly 8:00 PM on January 8, 2026. The message was simple: chant together, death to the dictator, wherever you are. It occupied less storage than a single pixel of the videos Starlink was designed to stream. And when Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps activated the most sophisticated electronic warfare campaign ever deployed against a commercial satellite constellation, achieving packet loss rates between thirty and eighty percent across the country, that message got through anyway.
The regime had spent three hundred million dollars acquiring Russian Krasukha-4 broadband jammers. They had deployed Murmansk-BN strategic interference systems capable of reaching targets five thousand kilometers distant. They had trained operators to wage electromagnetic war against Elon Musk’s satellites with the systematic intensity of a nation preparing for existential conflict. They succeeded beyond what any analyst predicted possible. They degraded Starlink service to levels that made video calls impossible, web browsing painful, and commercial applications useless.
And yet when the clock struck eight, neighborhoods across Tehran erupted in synchronized protest. The chanting was audible from rooftops across the capital. Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi’s coordination call, issued from exile, had achieved what no opposition figure had accomplished in forty-five years of Islamic Republic rule: nationwide simultaneous action despite active state suppression of communications.
What the Iranian regime discovered,…
Continue Reading