As a foreigner living in China, I'm wondering if such network can be technically prevented from being used in covered land/countries? How cool would it be to finally get an unrestricted access to the Internet here.
But I'm probably just dreaming.
I can't imagine finding a transmitter capable of reaching LEO being all that hard for a country.
This sort of thing works for militaries (e.g. for GPS) because you can assume that the receivers are secure, i.e. they're guarded by people carrying guns.
That's not really a viable plan when a hostile state can just buy a receiver with the built-in hopping algorithm from a retailer.
Starlink could implement something similar where the schedule is seeded using a key stored on the device, the day, and the receivers serial number (or other unique value). Supporting a million receivers is the same as supporting one, it is basically just one more input to a hash function.
!
They don’t just sit over China. There’s no way they could just start shooting them down without repercussions.
It absolutely will be.
What they have said is that it won't be Starlinks main line of business at the beginning, until the receiver costs have been driven down and the constellation is much more dense. At that point, they very much intend to provide internet access directly to millions of people.
So I think China will innovate and find ways to block access to starlink, without attacking the satellites.
No it doesn't. Satellite-satellite lasers can follow a direct route at the speed of light in a vacuum, much like those microwave towers used by high-frequency traders. Done right it'll be lower latency than ground-based fiber optics (which snake over the terrain and only transmit signals at about 2/3 the speed of light).
The laser comms are very much on the roadmap, however they were not ready in time for the first launch, and SpaceX has a hard deadline to meet for getting sats up there, so the first generation is going to just bounce your signal back to a ground station. (Which will bounce it to the next visible sat to push it forwards, unless it has fiber.)
[0] https://www.outfittersatellite.com/Countries-with-Satellite-...
If Starlink were to pose a problem in China, that's how they'd go about it. Destroying the satellites would be way too flashy. There's also the added benefit--from their perspective--that Starlink's mere presence would be a filter for their domestic surveillance; anyone willing to go through the effort of buying a likely illegal antenna, setting it up, and then trying to disguise it is the exact sort of person they'd want to monitor. Which is a pretty depressing thing to think about.