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How is the uplink working? Dishes don’t have transmitters.

In the case of "toosheh", there is no uplink, it's a one way transfer of curated content in a compressed archive. They're using leased Ku band transponder space on a geostationary satellite generally above the region, same as commercial TV channels.

You're describing a unidirectional data flow for Toosheh which makes sense but in the article it mentions payloads of videos from all over Iran. From what I've read VPNs were also shut down so how did the Iranians output videos? Was it purely journalists that had access to outside networks?

Thankfully up until recently Iran's attempts at a great firewall have not been as successful as China. There's "private" ISPs in Iran but they're all required to singlehome to the state owned ASN, which operates all of the transit links to the outside world.

From a network engineering perspective I would say that Iranian government acumen at running advanced DPI systems for automated detection/blocking of VPN traffic on a per-flow basis is much less advanced than China's. The most talented Iranian network engineers can generally emigrate somewhere else and get paid a better salary to not work on projects they find personally distasteful.

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