| ▲ | Gigachad 6 hours ago | |||||||||||||
In that day whatever is jamming starlink will just jam mesh radio too. It'll likely be even easier. | ||||||||||||||
| ▲ | andwur 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | |||||||||||||
It's a different jamming scenario however. Starlink is comparatively centralised, and reliant on both terrestrial (ground stations) and satellite communication. While the terminals themselves are sparse and widely distributed, the backbone infrastructure is far less so. It's possible to target the satellites, ground stations and critical service dependencies (e.g. GPS) rather than needing to target the hundred of thousands/millions of terminals directly. The mesh networks are dealing with, by definition, a sparse and widely distributed set of devices which are independently configured and controlled, and in their current widely available form are only dealing with terrestrial communication. Without that point of centralisation you would need to focus on targetted regional jamming, as from a practical standpoint you cannot perform wideband RF jamming over an entire country - signal jammers don't scale that well, and geographic features come into play. As an example you might effectively block mesh networks from operating reliably in a given city, but if people were to move outside of that area then the mesh would operate again. Geography is both a strength and a weakness here: a mountain range will impede direct communication with someone on the other side, but it will also have the same effect on jammers which will vastly increase the cost to deploy them in a ubiquitous fashion. | ||||||||||||||
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| ▲ | api 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | |||||||||||||
That’s really the killer for survivalist mesh ideas. It’s trivially easy to jam, and if it’s open it’s also easy to DDOS. Jamming is done in military scenarios too, but in that case it’s limited by the fact that a jammer is a big transmitter painting itself with a big sign that says “fire missile here.” Civilian mesh doesn’t have that fallback. | ||||||||||||||
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