Comment by lxgr 2 days ago
Iridium works extremely well for what it was designed for – truly global, low latency communications without requiring a directional antenna. Unfortunately, that also means very low data rates.
It only gained packed-switched data with the second generation satellite network, but data rates are still very low (think hundreds of kbps, and I believe even that needs high-gain antennas).
Viasat fixed modems got bricked at start of the war in Ukraine and some collateral one's in border areas.
Interesting how the US goes absolutely ballistic about some random dude violating the "Computer Security Act" on a small scale, but didn't react at all to this massive, incredibly impactful, attack.
it didn't impact Americans. it impacted us Europeans but at the time this went down we were too dependent on Russia's cheap gas (and, frankly, lacked the military power) to raise the appropriate level of stink.
Hell we let Russia freely execute dissidents (Skripal or the Berlin Tiergarten murder come to my mind) and tolerated a land-grab war by little green men in 2014. Either of these actions would have warranted serious consequences, the Crimea/Donbas grab would be a casus belli if you ask me. But again, we were too busy sucking Putin off for cheap gas.
You are right, thanks. I mixed them up. Iridium is also providing service in ua now, and was unaffected at the start of the war.
"Some" is an understatement lol. Here in Germany 3.800 (!) wind turbines lost remote control (and thus were forced offline) until the terminals could be changed because their command uplink was via Viasat.
~Iridium~ devices were bricked in the first days of the invasion, iirc. That's why starlink was such a big deal, and that's why the usmil wanted it "yesterday" after it proved itself in ua. They had to set up a dedicated unit to deal with starlink, as every branch was trying to get it on their own and complicated purchasing. That unit / project was also called starshield, confusing the matter with the other starshield project that uses starlink buses + ng sensor packages.
edit: it was Viasat not Iridium, I got them mixed up.