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Comment by howlgarnish | Hacker News Reader

The current Starlink launch is limited to the US and parts of Canada. What would happen if I sign up there and then physically ship my dish to Saudi Arabia/China/North Korea? Would the service keep working (subject to satellite availability, which will obviously not be great), or are there geoblocks in place?

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In addition to the points made by toomuchtodo, I believe Starlink currently relies on the presence of nearby ground stations to relay your packets to/from the Internet backbone. Eventually they plan satellite-to-satellite hops but I don't think that's enabled yet.

The terms of service you agree to at signup dictate you’ll use the equipment at the service location you provided with your order, and the constellation is able to determine ground station positions (StarLink can, theoretically, replace the functionality of the GPS constellation using ~0.8% of total downlink capacity). SpaceX would likely comply with their FCC fixed station license and US gov sanctions requirements through technical mechanisms.

It depends on two things currently:

- Ground station

- SpaceX allowing you access from that location

Some beta testers have moved around their antennas and they worked even when not at the 'official' location. So currently it 'seem' like they are just relaying on beta tester to be mostly honest.

Once you have real sat-to-sat laser comms (next generation of sats, currently being tested) you can use it anywhere theoretically.

We don't know what the long term strategy is around geo-blocking. In theory they could have an issue where some location is fully subscribed and then somebody is moving there causing an issue. It will be interesting to see what policy they will use.

There are reports that if you take the dish more than about ~35 miles from the co-ordinates you said you'd use it at, it stops working.

For the beta it seems to be tied to a geographic location.

It'll be interesting to see whether SpaceX allows, relatively easily and simply, Starlink to be used by brave people living under oppressive regimes: it could allow for far freer information than what's currently available.

Don't they need to get approval in each country they operate?

For now, but only because SpaceX is playing nice. If SpaceX decides to transmit to rural Syria against the wishes of the Assad regime, and the people on the ground find a receiver, who's going to stop them*?

(other than the US, if it so chooses)

Interestingly enough, the extent of a country's sovereignty in (air)space is legally quite unclear. It's pretty well established that countries can regulate planes and such flying at an altitude of ~10 km, and the Outer Space Treaty bans claims on celestrial bodies, but everything in between (including Starlink's satellites in LEO, some 2,000 km from the Earth's surface) is in a grey zone.

Legal issues aside, they're also quite literally beyond the reach of all but a small handful of spacefaring nations, and even a nation like China that has the technical capability would not resort to actively shooting them down unless other avenues were exhausted.

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