Old fashioned phone trees can be really useful IMHO OP. We used them when I worked in a school. If there was winter weather, you'd call say, everyone with a last name from A to G in the staff directory, someone else calls G to K, and so on and so forth.
You can combine the phone tree with literal runners -- so basically, someone takes their burner and calls suburbs A,B,C and D and then the runners go out and pass the word about the protest or action.
I guess that's the strength of mesh networks. Benn Jordan recently showed how to build one disguised as a lawn light for less than $40. BitChat works with tech people already have as well
yah but not sure how someone in Iran can actually get the hardware shipped to them (I just tried Tehran as delivery, and starlink website said "no"), and also would need a bank or credit card from a non-sanctioned country to be able to actually pay for it
States like Iran have signal catchers, where they can get a rough idea where a signal is coming from through triangulation. The US military has had this for over 20 years now. Often these coordinates are fed in as targets into weapons systems.
If you're going the radio route these come to mind:
Meshtastic: 1W, one band, local. Useful if Iran doesn't know about it. But easy to jam and probably triangulate.
Wifi Halow: 1W, can possibly hop between bands, but probably also really easy to jam and triangulate.
WSPR: Possibly good, transmitters can hide in the noise floor, and can go long distances with 100mW of power, but slow. Probably triangulable, very easy to jam once located in the spectrum. Data can be transmitted and received with off the shelf components.
Military Radios: Very good. Transmitters can frequency hop, making triangulation and jamming difficult. Also encryption. You can easily transmit in the same frequency space that Iran would be using to avoid jamming. But also, mostly unobtanium. I have heard stories about US military radios showing up at Ham Fests.
HF radio. Highly depdendent on space weather, but generally I can communicate around the world with only 100 watts and a long wire.
Be aware though that transmitting on any radio is like turning on a giant, extremely bright light bulb directly above your antenna. Anyone with basic radio know-how will be able to hear you and locate you.
It's very silly that "high frequency" is among the lowest frequencies, and that we wound up with Very, Ultra, Super, Extremely, and Tremendously High Frequencies!
Back in ye olden days, HF was really high! What we'd consider today to be near useless due to limited bandwidth and insane antenna requirements were once the primary frequencies for communications.
Yggdrasil (mesh network) would be the longer-term solution. It is fast, resilient, and pure IPv6. But you'll have to establish IP links between interested parties to peer over. Eventually some will be able to peer over the internet, and connect everyone else to the rest of the world.
For dense areas, mesh applications like BitChat (Jack Dorsey) could bypass the need for a network with p2p bluetooth mesh networks. And works with existing devices, vs something like meshtastic which needs an installed base (afaik).
Does it actually work though? My experience with Meshtastic is it’s so difficult to get a message delivered beyond the nearest hop that it’s almost useless. And Bluetooth has a significantly shorter range than LoRa.
The LoRa enthusiasts in my area seem to all have moved to Meshcore, largely because of a quirk in Meshtastic's routing algorithm that doesn't handle nodes with widely varying visibility/power/noisefloor well. They report regularly getting traffic hundreds of miles. There might be a couple mountaintop repeaters in the mesh though.
For OP's situation I think runners and a store and forward system like Scuttlebutt/Briar/etc might work better. But I'd love to see a couple of thorough case studies on that kind of system, they've been around for many years targeting related scenarios.
I’ve tried MeshCore as well and discovered zero nodes. At least what I’ve seen it looks like Meshtastic implemented the same routing fixes MeshCore has.
I think the issue is more that getting a message many kilometres out using a couple of nodes sitting in non prime locations is just unreliable. The noise is too high. There’s also a limit on how many messages can be sent while using flood routing.
But did all the nodes and repeaters update to the version of meshtastic with routing? Meshcore started with routing out of the box.
I don't think it's the noise that's too high, my original understanding of the meshtastic 2.0 protocol (from this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7v6UbC5blJU) was that an edge device would receive priority. So the message might go the wrong direction, say. Or, worse, a meshtastic radio in a basement might get priority.
Because they didn't understand (or care about) network topologies from the start and reliable message transmission, not to mention the versions of devices that are still on their network, I'm guessing it's gonna be a couple more years before they finally get their act together.
I would say there are significantly more nodes on the Meshtastic network with the latest routing than there are MeshCore nodes. A gap that will likely only increase over time.
In Melbourne, Australia I was able to pick up 450 nodes on Meshtastic while I got zero on MeshCore after weeks of searching.
unless you already have the gear and a subscription, not sure how an Iranian citizen can get starlink set up: starlink doesn't ship there, so needs to be individually imported, plus will need to be paid for by a debit/credit card from a non-sanctioned country
some DNS tunneling solutions work (dnstt for example). Also, many people have smuggled Starlink are are providing proxies inside Iran.
Ideally cjdns or similar can be used inside the country to create an alternative encrypted mesh network inside the borders, with some "exit nodes" out.
Couriers and USB flash drives can be pretty effective. They're high latency but can be very high bandwidth. Look at the El Paquete network in Cuba[0] as inspiration. Self-contained HTML/JavaScript SPAs can provide navigation and the likes of TiddlyWiki[1] can allow for collaboration. A network of couriers can move as fast as road traffic and distribute stuff pretty widely.
Contents can be re-shared locally over ad-hoc or mesh WiFi networks even without Internet access.
Encryption and steganography can obscure the contents of drives from casual inspection. You can stuff a lot of extraneous data in Office XML documents that are just zip files and look innocuous when opened.
1. For current events content add descriptions, locations, and timestamps to everything. The recipients need that context.
2. Even unencrypted files can be verified with cryptographic signatures. These can be distributed on separate channels including Bluetooth file transfers.
3. Include offline installers for browsers like Dillo or Firefox. Favor plain text formats where possible. FAT32 has the broadest support in terms of file system for the flash drives. Batch, PowerShell, and bash scripts can also be effective in doing more complex things while not needing local installation or invasive installations on people's computers.
Do we need to come up with more internet protocols/services that don't require a negotiation process? So that it would work better with very high latency sneaker-net flash-drive networks? Especially for the already asynchronous ones like email? I could envision a user with a messenger/email-like client who "sends" (encrypted) messages that get put on a flash drive. This is carried around the neighborhood, etc, where others do the same. Eventually someone takes it to a machine with regular internet access, where the messages get delivered to their intended recipients. And then replies to these messages (coming hours, days, weeks later) also get put on a flash drive, and maybe hopefully get back to the original receivers. And if the internet-down situation has been resolved, the recipients will already have their messages, but if not, they'll get them when the flash drive arrives.
I suppose this isn't complete without mentioning RFC 1149 (IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers).
In this case NNCP (Note-to-Node Copy)[0] would be useful. It fully supports sneakernet/floppynet distribution but also has an online mode that could be used by nodes with active Internet connections.
If you’re using the circuit-switched mobile phone calls it’s unlikely you will be able to negotiate that; GSM compression is optimised for voice and not data.
If you have a phone or cellular dongle with a serial interface you might be able to initiate a “data” call which gives you a modem-like link at speeds much higher than running an actual modem on the audio path. Note that this kind of non-standard usage will stand out like a sore thumb so might not be advisable.
Problem is that most methods involve making your location known openly. The Dark Forest book of the Remembrance of the Earth Past explains why it is not a good idea to do so in the current circumstances
~5m antenna during the day, 10m at night for a simple dipole antenna
I'd be more worried about them being able to triangulate the radio signals though. If they can jam GPS, surely they can detect a 100W signal around 14MHz.
What do you think amateur radio does? Why do you think that broadcasting your location, and that you're looking to get information from somewhere other than the approved sources will end up in anything other than tragedy? What information do you think could reliably be provided with amateur radio in a situation like this?
> so that you can at least get information out to others.
So they can do what with it? The people who can action it already have intensive satellite imagery of the area and domestic intelligence assets. The level of risk to reward for a citizen to do this is fairly low.
There is no privacy in amateur radio. That is not a matter of preference, it is a regulatory and physical reality.
Amateur radio transmissions are public, unencrypted, and attributable. Callsigns are required, modes and frequencies are well known, and transmissions are trivially direction-findable. In a country like Iran, where RF spectrum is actively monitored and unauthorized communications are treated as a security issue, transmitting on amateur bands is effectively broadcasting your location and intent. Direction finding is routine, fast, and does not require exotic equipment. One transmission can be enough.
In the US and most other countries, amateur radio is tightly regulated. Encryption to obscure content is explicitly prohibited. Ignoring this can result in fines, seizure of equipment, and loss of license. Foreign operators encouraging or participating in such use are not insulated from consequences simply because the target country is authoritarian.
I did not claim to have a better solution. That's the point. When the threat model includes surveillance, attribution, and enforcement, there may be no safe civilian workaround. Suggesting amateur radio in this context is not “imperfect but helpful”, it reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what amateur radio actually is and how it is regulated.
Amateur radio can't provide privacy, safety, or reliable information flow under an active crackdown. Pretending otherwise is irresponsible.
Old fashioned phone trees can be really useful IMHO OP. We used them when I worked in a school. If there was winter weather, you'd call say, everyone with a last name from A to G in the staff directory, someone else calls G to K, and so on and so forth.
You can combine the phone tree with literal runners -- so basically, someone takes their burner and calls suburbs A,B,C and D and then the runners go out and pass the word about the protest or action.
Radio stations too. The US civil rights movement sometimes used radio DJs to call people out for protests.
"Stay tuned boppers, stay tuned."
An important factor to consider when answering this question, is that the average monthly wage in Iran is only $200 to $500 USD/month.
Why it is important?
I guess because a single Starlink subscription would be 30-80% of their monthly income.
I guess that's the strength of mesh networks. Benn Jordan recently showed how to build one disguised as a lawn light for less than $40. BitChat works with tech people already have as well
It has been reported in the press that Starlink subscription fee has been waived for Iran, so people with receivers can use it for free.
yah but not sure how someone in Iran can actually get the hardware shipped to them (I just tried Tehran as delivery, and starlink website said "no"), and also would need a bank or credit card from a non-sanctioned country to be able to actually pay for it
> I just tried Tehran as delivery, and starlink website said "no"
I hope you're not a list now.
Pretty sure the cheapest receiver you can buy is still $600
States like Iran have signal catchers, where they can get a rough idea where a signal is coming from through triangulation. The US military has had this for over 20 years now. Often these coordinates are fed in as targets into weapons systems.
If you're going the radio route these come to mind:
Meshtastic: 1W, one band, local. Useful if Iran doesn't know about it. But easy to jam and probably triangulate.
Wifi Halow: 1W, can possibly hop between bands, but probably also really easy to jam and triangulate.
WSPR: Possibly good, transmitters can hide in the noise floor, and can go long distances with 100mW of power, but slow. Probably triangulable, very easy to jam once located in the spectrum. Data can be transmitted and received with off the shelf components.
Military Radios: Very good. Transmitters can frequency hop, making triangulation and jamming difficult. Also encryption. You can easily transmit in the same frequency space that Iran would be using to avoid jamming. But also, mostly unobtanium. I have heard stories about US military radios showing up at Ham Fests.
HF radio. Highly depdendent on space weather, but generally I can communicate around the world with only 100 watts and a long wire.
Be aware though that transmitting on any radio is like turning on a giant, extremely bright light bulb directly above your antenna. Anyone with basic radio know-how will be able to hear you and locate you.
I had to think for a second to realize that HF means lower frequency than VHF, not high frequency in an absolute sense.
It's very silly that "high frequency" is among the lowest frequencies, and that we wound up with Very, Ultra, Super, Extremely, and Tremendously High Frequencies!
Reminds me of High Speed USB.
Back in ye olden days, HF was really high! What we'd consider today to be near useless due to limited bandwidth and insane antenna requirements were once the primary frequencies for communications.
I wondered if that was the case! 28 MHz must've seemed pretty high at the time. :)
V.92 dial-up. Slow and expensive, but it's Internet access.
Yggdrasil (mesh network) would be the longer-term solution. It is fast, resilient, and pure IPv6. But you'll have to establish IP links between interested parties to peer over. Eventually some will be able to peer over the internet, and connect everyone else to the rest of the world.
Is it possible to setup LoRA mesh networks in Iran? LoRA chips should be on the order of <$5 bulk shippable from China
You'd have to have a huge network spanning the entire country to get a message out however
For dense areas, mesh applications like BitChat (Jack Dorsey) could bypass the need for a network with p2p bluetooth mesh networks. And works with existing devices, vs something like meshtastic which needs an installed base (afaik).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitchat
Does it actually work though? My experience with Meshtastic is it’s so difficult to get a message delivered beyond the nearest hop that it’s almost useless. And Bluetooth has a significantly shorter range than LoRa.
The LoRa enthusiasts in my area seem to all have moved to Meshcore, largely because of a quirk in Meshtastic's routing algorithm that doesn't handle nodes with widely varying visibility/power/noisefloor well. They report regularly getting traffic hundreds of miles. There might be a couple mountaintop repeaters in the mesh though.
For OP's situation I think runners and a store and forward system like Scuttlebutt/Briar/etc might work better. But I'd love to see a couple of thorough case studies on that kind of system, they've been around for many years targeting related scenarios.
I’ve tried MeshCore as well and discovered zero nodes. At least what I’ve seen it looks like Meshtastic implemented the same routing fixes MeshCore has.
I think the issue is more that getting a message many kilometres out using a couple of nodes sitting in non prime locations is just unreliable. The noise is too high. There’s also a limit on how many messages can be sent while using flood routing.
But did all the nodes and repeaters update to the version of meshtastic with routing? Meshcore started with routing out of the box.
I don't think it's the noise that's too high, my original understanding of the meshtastic 2.0 protocol (from this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7v6UbC5blJU) was that an edge device would receive priority. So the message might go the wrong direction, say. Or, worse, a meshtastic radio in a basement might get priority.
Because they didn't understand (or care about) network topologies from the start and reliable message transmission, not to mention the versions of devices that are still on their network, I'm guessing it's gonna be a couple more years before they finally get their act together.
I would say there are significantly more nodes on the Meshtastic network with the latest routing than there are MeshCore nodes. A gap that will likely only increase over time.
In Melbourne, Australia I was able to pick up 450 nodes on Meshtastic while I got zero on MeshCore after weeks of searching.
Out of curiosity, how to Meshtastic and Meshcore compare to Reticulum?
Maybe https://meshtastic.org?
WiFi Halow is a longer range protocol (still probably not long enough). But something like this can get people connected: https://openmanet.net
Starlink and/or BGAN/satellite phones.
unless you already have the gear and a subscription, not sure how an Iranian citizen can get starlink set up: starlink doesn't ship there, so needs to be individually imported, plus will need to be paid for by a debit/credit card from a non-sanctioned country
starlink was explictly blocked there. they are jamming gps which is needed for it
The jamming is expensive to maintain and not 100% effective. It's still your best shot.
some DNS tunneling solutions work (dnstt for example). Also, many people have smuggled Starlink are are providing proxies inside Iran.
Ideally cjdns or similar can be used inside the country to create an alternative encrypted mesh network inside the borders, with some "exit nodes" out.
Couriers and USB flash drives can be pretty effective. They're high latency but can be very high bandwidth. Look at the El Paquete network in Cuba[0] as inspiration. Self-contained HTML/JavaScript SPAs can provide navigation and the likes of TiddlyWiki[1] can allow for collaboration. A network of couriers can move as fast as road traffic and distribute stuff pretty widely.
Contents can be re-shared locally over ad-hoc or mesh WiFi networks even without Internet access.
Encryption and steganography can obscure the contents of drives from casual inspection. You can stuff a lot of extraneous data in Office XML documents that are just zip files and look innocuous when opened.
1. For current events content add descriptions, locations, and timestamps to everything. The recipients need that context.
2. Even unencrypted files can be verified with cryptographic signatures. These can be distributed on separate channels including Bluetooth file transfers.
3. Include offline installers for browsers like Dillo or Firefox. Favor plain text formats where possible. FAT32 has the broadest support in terms of file system for the flash drives. Batch, PowerShell, and bash scripts can also be effective in doing more complex things while not needing local installation or invasive installations on people's computers.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Paquete_Semanal
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TiddlyWiki
Do we need to come up with more internet protocols/services that don't require a negotiation process? So that it would work better with very high latency sneaker-net flash-drive networks? Especially for the already asynchronous ones like email? I could envision a user with a messenger/email-like client who "sends" (encrypted) messages that get put on a flash drive. This is carried around the neighborhood, etc, where others do the same. Eventually someone takes it to a machine with regular internet access, where the messages get delivered to their intended recipients. And then replies to these messages (coming hours, days, weeks later) also get put on a flash drive, and maybe hopefully get back to the original receivers. And if the internet-down situation has been resolved, the recipients will already have their messages, but if not, they'll get them when the flash drive arrives.
I suppose this isn't complete without mentioning RFC 1149 (IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers).
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1149
In this case NNCP (Note-to-Node Copy)[0] would be useful. It fully supports sneakernet/floppynet distribution but also has an online mode that could be used by nodes with active Internet connections.
[0] http://www.nncpgo.org/index.html
If the phones are working, 56k modem.
If you’re using the circuit-switched mobile phone calls it’s unlikely you will be able to negotiate that; GSM compression is optimised for voice and not data.
If you have a phone or cellular dongle with a serial interface you might be able to initiate a “data” call which gives you a modem-like link at speeds much higher than running an actual modem on the audio path. Note that this kind of non-standard usage will stand out like a sore thumb so might not be advisable.
Well, up to 33.6k modem. 56k required cooperation between the telco and ISPs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoicism
Thanks. Exactly how can I send this page to my friends and family back in Iran?
You cannot, they are on their own with what they have. My genuine condolences and sympathy.
Problem is that most methods involve making your location known openly. The Dark Forest book of the Remembrance of the Earth Past explains why it is not a good idea to do so in the current circumstances
HAM radio is your best option.
I wonder if QRP would be something?
https://hackaday.com/2016/03/08/how-low-can-you-go-the-world...
also
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WSPR_(amateur_radio_software) https://wsjt.sourceforge.io/wsjtx.html
plus the super simple "Fireball QRP transmitter"
https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-DX/73-magazine/73-...
We need a communication method that even fools can use.
That way, we might end up with enough nodes such that mesh networking comes within reach.
Isn't one of the problems is that to get appreciable range you have to have a fairly obvious antenna setup?
~5m antenna during the day, 10m at night for a simple dipole antenna
I'd be more worried about them being able to triangulate the radio signals though. If they can jam GPS, surely they can detect a 100W signal around 14MHz.
What do you think amateur radio does? Why do you think that broadcasting your location, and that you're looking to get information from somewhere other than the approved sources will end up in anything other than tragedy? What information do you think could reliably be provided with amateur radio in a situation like this?
The OP wanted a way to bypass a internet shutdown, not a perfect solution.
And you know, I'm fairly sure being able to talk to the outside world makes it so that you can at least get information out to others.
Pray tell, what methods do YOU have to bypass a shutdown with privacy and no reliance on ISP and resistant to jamming?
> so that you can at least get information out to others.
So they can do what with it? The people who can action it already have intensive satellite imagery of the area and domestic intelligence assets. The level of risk to reward for a citizen to do this is fairly low.
There is no privacy in amateur radio. That is not a matter of preference, it is a regulatory and physical reality.
Amateur radio transmissions are public, unencrypted, and attributable. Callsigns are required, modes and frequencies are well known, and transmissions are trivially direction-findable. In a country like Iran, where RF spectrum is actively monitored and unauthorized communications are treated as a security issue, transmitting on amateur bands is effectively broadcasting your location and intent. Direction finding is routine, fast, and does not require exotic equipment. One transmission can be enough.
In the US and most other countries, amateur radio is tightly regulated. Encryption to obscure content is explicitly prohibited. Ignoring this can result in fines, seizure of equipment, and loss of license. Foreign operators encouraging or participating in such use are not insulated from consequences simply because the target country is authoritarian.
I did not claim to have a better solution. That's the point. When the threat model includes surveillance, attribution, and enforcement, there may be no safe civilian workaround. Suggesting amateur radio in this context is not “imperfect but helpful”, it reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what amateur radio actually is and how it is regulated.
Amateur radio can't provide privacy, safety, or reliable information flow under an active crackdown. Pretending otherwise is irresponsible.
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