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drevil-v2

Hah a feature like this would make iPhone 13 persona non grata for many governments around the world.

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Clueless travellers going to places like India and getting their Iphones confiscated sounds interesting

Edit: to clarify India banned satcom devices

Why?

India has (had?) a monopoly on telecommunications. My company couldn’t send voip phones to our Indian employees like we do for employees everywhere else.

Following the Mumbai terror attacks in 2011, the Directorate General of Shipping (DGS)in India banned the use of “Thuraya, Iridium and other such satellite phones” in Indian waters.

Satcom is banned in India : https://apollosat.com/intel/satellite-phone-ban-warning-to-v...

Are you sure it is completely banned? I thought you just need permission (in the form of a "no objection certificate") from the Home Ministry in India before you can own and operate a satellite phone?

No chance getting that on travel visa, but you're right

Why would this type of feature invoke that type of response?

Internet access that isn't subject to whatever domestic firewalling is in place, presumably.

If you come to China with a foreign SIM card and use data roaming, there are no firewall restrictions there. At least that's what I know from a few years ago. One trick travellers had was to get a SIM card from Hong Kong (again, before the crackdowns) because the roaming prices inside China were good (I can't remember if it was non-existant) but the Internet was not censored...

Many governments have strict censorship. This bypasses all government controls.

Well, not quite - even satellite internet has base stations somewhere and your internet follows the rules of that country.

Satellites can bounce signals between each other while in orbit to work-around those pesky geopolitical borders.

...this was also part of the plot of Independence Day.

Governments have no control over satellite signals.

They can shoot down the satellites if they break the law though. That's why bypassing China's firewall isn't as easy as sneaking in a Starlink base station

> They can shoot down the satellites if they break the law though.

I don't think they can tractably do that. If India started shooting down US satellites they'd be in for a whole world of problems.

No, but they do have control over people and property.

They have absolutely no way to detect what those people are doing with that property when it comes to satellites though - they can't detect that you're doing it, and they don't have much practical way to block it either.

All competent governments on earth already regulate wireless communications, including satellite communications. Most have found it fairly effective to regulate trade and manufacture of such devices.

At a minimum, it is effective enough that it is a response that would be expected to be elicited if a government found a device undesirable.

I don't know what your experience is in this area, but how do you believe they regulate access to a satellite from another nation flying overhead if your people have the device to access it?

You can just about jam GPS signals locally (within a few km if you pour the resources into it.) Nations are not able in practice to generally jam satellite signals.

We know that nations are not able to do this in practice... because it's how people from those locations are calling out to us.

> how do you believe they regulate access to a satellite from another nation flying overhead if your people have the device to access it?

You don’t. You prevent people from getting access to the device in the first place. There are no countries where people already have iPhone 13s. A country that doesn’t want them, could certainly ban their import.

There ain’t too many people watching HBO on their satellite TVs in North Korea.

> You don’t.

Exactly.

> There are no countries where people already have iPhone 13s.

They have Iridium, Garmin, etc. Any number of satellite devices.

> A country that doesn’t want them, could certainly ban their import.

I think you're super-naive if you think import bans on these devices work in practice, sorry. They're easily concealable.

The question originally posed above, that you responded to, was about a government response to the iPhone 13 specifically.

The point is that they restrict you obtaining said property. Of course not 100%, but how popular would an iPhone that you need to smuggle into the country and that gets you arrested (or at least the device destroyed and you fined) if found by police be?

No specific response is needed as a bunch of countries already have pre-existing rules that require prohibit importing satellite communications devices without special permits even (or perhaps especially for) personal use - it just doesn't get much attention as e.g. Iridium phones are not that common.

But if these countries do nothing and change nothing, this feature means that it would be prohibited to bring iPhone 13s in the country without special permits.

I am sure that Apple will fix this, probably by disabling this feature in India. That is one of the nice things about Apple, when you run into issues like this, things happen, precisely because they are so common.

It’s worse than that - bringing one in just as a tourist could bring heavy consequences and there’s no clear communication about that rule as it is.

That feature is very likely going to be geofenced.

That only works until the first jailbreak.

The satellite network knows where you are too and can just choose to not service you if you are in a banned area.

What kind of precision we talk about here and why would they give a damn? It would suck for sailors to get their satcom banned because they appear to be close to the Indian waters but not intending to enter

The precision is probably on the order of the Iridium spot beam size, which as far as I know is 300 km.

As to why: Indian customs officers confiscating all iPhones is probably bad for business (in the long term).

Isn't the baseband a separate chip which would have to be cracked separately? A phone already needs to enforce many RF restrictions, one more doesn't sound like a big deal.

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