this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2023
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I was having a hard time imagining which company this could be. Not that I'm a fan of Verizon or Comcast, but I think they know what side their bread is buttered on. Which one wouldn't?
Then I remembered Starlink exists.
Don't think they were colluding with the provider. They probably just put a burner sim card into a 4g module and sent data over a VPN to China whenever it had signal.
It could have even been one of those multi SIM router things that has network redundancy.
The blurb says primarily for navigation.
So it was using the starlink signals like gps signal and therefore they needed to correlate with the carrier to get a rough time sync.
I wonder what timing data is freely available on the starlink acquisition signal.
Why would they need data then? With GPS can get a 1metre accurate chip for like 20 bucks and it's way smaller. And no need for any carrier or subscription.
Mapping out network topology? Who knows.
Whatever the collected data was, it could have been sent to their satellites for long haul back home.
It’s a satellite provider. Cell networks don’t work at that altitude. Starlink was my first guess too but, after some more thought, it could be Hughesnet. They probably have wider coverage.
Yeah, their coverage is hughe
Y U G E N E T
So are their pings
Hugh Mungous
Probably Hughesnet or Viasat.