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Comment by a012 | Hacker News Reader

The terminal and/or account isn't geo locked? By this news I can register a Starlink account in a country and then move to my not-supported country?

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If you pay $200 a month you should be able to use it everywhere in the Americas and south of the Sahara. No India, China or Pakistan though

Some plans have worldwide coverage.

I believe starlink is deliberately allowing the service to work in places without licensing [1], because they want to follow the precedent of other sat-phone and sat-TV operators who just have worldwide service without getting permission from every government first. (and in many cases don't have the ability to geoblock, because the signal beam covers entire continents)

[1]: https://www.itweb.co.za/article/icasa-takes-note-of-illegal-...

> don't have the ability to geoblock

I don’t think anything is stopping them from triangulating if they wanted to, right?

Physically impossible if you just have a couple satellites in GEO.

There is a GPS in the terminal and I can guarantee the gps data is transmitted to Starlink noc/hub in real time. It's trivial to geoblock terminals.

It's also fairly doable to spoof GPS if you care to. And I'm talking about the earlier satellite communicators, not Starlink, which can indeed easily triangulate.

Problem with that in context of Starlink is the terminal needs to know its position relative to the satellite to communicate with it; spoof position, and you're likely to lose comms.

Yes. I was not talking about Starlink at all.

At least for maritime terminal many of them can use external GPS source, so it is very simple to spoof GPS. However, that would also mean the terminal would connect to the satellite on wrong frequency as it would think it is in a spot beam it is not and as such you would get crappy signal or no signal at all. That said, many geo-satellites spot beams are the size of Ukraine, so it doesn't matter that much if you just need to move your position a kilometer or two.

Many satcom operators geoblock their terminals in regions where they do not have license to transmit. This is trivial as both modem and hub/nms/noc will have the gps data from the equipment.

Most governments don't care enough to do anything about illegal transmitting, but some, like the Indian coast guard, has been known to board ships and write out fines and cause a ton of paper work for ships sailing with transmitting satcom equipment. And often they don't know how to determine if the equipment is transmitting or not, so it's safest for the crew to just turn it off when within Indian territorial waters even if the satcom provider automatically mutes equipment.

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