Commercial satellite gear and state crises

I want you to picture a scene and really try to put yourself in this specific environment. It is January in the year 2025, you are standing outside at the various border crossing station in Finland right way up there. Yeah, and the landscape is entirely swallowed by winter like it is desolate. And the ambient temperature is sitting at a brutal negative. 27 degrees Celsius. Oh wow. Yeah, that is the kind of cold where I mean, where every breath physically aches in your chest and your primary concern is honestly just maintaining body heat. Well and operating any kind of you know Advanced electronic Hardware in those conditions is just total nightmare, right? Liquid Crystal displays, they just freeze solid batteries lose their voltage capacity within a matter of minutes. Yeah, they just drain instantly. Exactly. Even the lubricants in mechanical Parts turn into this sort of thick sludge. Yeah, so the environment itself is actively fighting your attempt to maintain any kind of digital footprint, right? Its entire Early hostile but sitting in the middle of this freezing. Expanse is a fairly standard. You know, unassuming Ford Transit van, okay? And beside this van is a metal pole standing exactly 3.8 meters tall in the snow. Yeah, mounted. Right at the top of that pole is a commercial starlink satellite terminal the exact kind, you could just order online for your house, right? A civilian dish. Exactly, but the detail that makes this entire image. So surreal is the geography, right? Less than one single meter away from where this civilian dishes, tracking satellites in the sky, is the Russian border. Yeah, that is, I mean it is an incredibly tense image. Specially, when you consider the geopolitical reality of 2025, because, you know, this isn't just some text, you were looking at a literal trial for National survival, right? The researchers who are operating that dish out in the freezing cold. They were testing a really desperate, highly pragmatic solution to a terrifying question, which is, you know, what happens when the ground beneath our feet. Digitally speaking, just completely gives away what happens when an entire nation goes dark during a crisis. And that terrifying question is actually the entire focus of our Deep dive today. Yeah. Because we are exploring, this absolutely fascinating research framework created for the finished Ministry of Transport and Communications. And the mission here is to evaluate the viability of low earth. Orbit satellites, specifically commercial networks like starlink for State preparedness. Basically, how do you keep a society functioning when the standard grid collapses? Well, because State preparedness is, it's the absolute Baseline functionality of a civilization, right? Yeah, if your city's terrestrial Network, just vanishes this afternoon How do emergency instructions? Even reach you exactly how do the national broadcasters? Stay on the air to coordinate and evacuation or issue shelter in place warnings. I mean, without that flow of information, a localized emergency, just immediately Cascades into Widespread Panic, right? And we have a really remarkable stack of sources. Guiding us through this today, we're looking at research, experts titled AO, satellites, in state preparedness and this was a collaborative study. It was conducted by The Finnish Broadcasting Company, which is known as Yale alongside the national emergency supply agency and traffic home, right. But we also have these incredible almost philosophical notes and Technical logs from the actual researcher, who engineered this border test. Yes, Mika Säppi. Exactly. Mika, who is the head of Technology at from in the tech branch of the Collins group and honestly, having puppies background notes, it really elevates this Beyond, just a dry, you know, government white paper because we get this front row seat into the Act engineering mindset, that's required to solve a catastrophic problem, but using off-the-shelf consumer technology. Yeah, I found myself getting so hooked by the almost like a macgyver-like Ingenuity of his approach. Yeah, very much so, but before we even get to his satellite solution, I think we really need to understand the problem on the ground first because we used terrestrial mobile networks. Every single day, write a stream video to navigate traffic make video calls and to us, they generally feel Invincible. Sure. So why is The Finnish government? So incredibly terrified of relying on these cell towers during a crisis. Well they feel Invincible to you because you only interact with them under optimized every day conditions, right? Normal Tuesdays. Exactly the terrestrial networks are engineered for average predictable human behavior. Okay. But the fundamental premise of this entire research is that especially in the shadow of ongoing Global events. We have to assume civilian Communications will fail. And the crazy thing is the most common cause of that failure, isn't some massive bomb or a sophisticated Cyber attack. Really, what is it? It's human panic panic, really because I mean, I can download a massive 4K movie file on my phone in two minutes on a normal day. Right? Why does that exact same network just completely collapse? Just because a few hundred people on a square mile. Try to read a basic text news alert during an emergency. If feels like the network should just automatically scale up. Well it comes down to the actual physical limitations of how a cell tower manages Wireless traffic, right? So a mobile network access point only has a finite amount of radio frequency spectrum. Think of them as like invisible Lanes on a highway. Now to allow hundreds of phones to use those exact same Lanes simultaneously. The tower uses a technique called time, slicing time. Slicing yeah. It literally shops the radio signal into these microscopic. Fractions of a second So it's rapidly switching its attached back and forth, back and forth between your phone, your neighbor's phone, the person down the street and so on. Okay? So it's sort of dealing out data like, like, a dealer handing out cards at a blackjack table just doing it millions of times a second that is actually a highly accurate way to visualize it. Yes. Okay. So now factor in an emergency, right? So, massive incident occurs and suddenly every single user in a three-mile radius grabs their device at the exact same millisecond. Oh man, they're all demanding a card from the dealer at the exact same time, right? The towers back hall, which is the computer, actually sorting this traffic because completely overmeld trying to allocate those microscopic time slices. So the dealer gets swamped by 1000 people and just drops the entire deck, literally drops the deck. The physical manifestation of this is what we call complete packet saturation, okay? So the latency just skyrockets because your data packets are essentially waiting in this massive invisible digital cue just to be recognized by the tower. Wow. And so the connection either slows to an unusable crawl or Of honestly, the network simply drops the connections entirely just to protect its own core Hardware from physically crashing, that's terrifying. It is. The architecture, is just mathematically incapable of handling, 100% of its user base. Transmitting simultaneously wasn't built for that, right? And I have to assume government's already know this, right? Which is why for First Responders, don't use the same 5G Network that I use to scroll social media. Exactly. The sources mention official Tetra networks. And in Finland, they use this specific system called Verve. Yes, Verve. So, if the civilian Network drops, why can't the civilian broadcasters? The people whose literal job? It is to keep the public informed. Why can't they just jump on that secure emergency network with the police, the Greek question, but it comes down to how traditional Tetra networks are physically designed. Okay, so Tetris stands for terrestrial trunked radio. And it was built for highly secure, highly reliable voice Communications, like walkie talkies right voice, and maybe really short, text bursts between police fire military units. And to do that reliably. It operates on narrow Gantt, frequencies narrow band. Yeah. And narrow band is fantastic for, you know, punching a voice signal through thick concrete walls or dense forests. It's incredibly robust but it has a very very low data capacity. Okay. So, And emergency worker can hit a button and say, send an ambulance to me in Street and that gets through instantly. Exactly instant. But if a news organization tries to push like, a high-definition live video feed or heavy radio audio streams to a national transmitter over that exact same network, you'd be like, trying to force a fire hose volume of water through, a tiny cocktail straw. Oh, wow. Yeah, the desert Network's physically cannot carry the broadband data that is required by modern broadcasters right, which means if the civilian Network drops due to human Panic, the national broadcasters are completely cut off from the outside world. Even if the police radio is next to them are working perfectly. So the broadcast goes dead right? When people need it, most exactly. And the researchers actually noted this exact bottle neck, they mentioned that the Finnish company behind Verve, a realistic. They clearly saw this issue and they developed a second generation system at play called for of two, right? Verve to and this upgrade actually operates On broadband. So it acts like a regular modern Mobile Data Network and the Really clever part is that it has a built-in prioritization protocol. Yes. So if I understand the sources correctly, if a police officer and a random civilian, both try to use data at the exact same time, the system automatically forces the official traffic through and throttles the civilian, that's exactly right on paper. Verve 2 solves the data saturation, problem perfectly, right. The official VIPs get digital right away, makes sense. But when you look at the actual physical deployment of Verve to you, uncover this massive glaring architectural flaw, which is that it uses the exact same physical cell towers as the civilian Network. Yes, it operates from The Identical physical infrastructure. Wow, the prioritization is merely software logic running on the exact same Hardware in the woods so it's basically like Having a dedicated painted VIP Lane on a massive suspension bridge, good analogy. Like, if there is a huge traffic jam because everyone is fleeing a city that VIP Lane is incredibly useful. The government, vehicles can just zip right past the gridlock, right? But if an antagonist plants an explosive and blows up the physical Bridge support pillars. It doesn't matter how exclusive your VIP Lane is. No, it doesn't. The bridge is gone and everyone goes into the water. Exactly. The medium carrying the traffic is completely destroyed software. Prioritization cannot fix a physical Hardware failure, right? And the research highlights an incredibly sobering case study to prove that we aren't just talking about, you know, sophisticated military, drones strike's taking out these Bridges know, we were talking about basic low-level vandalism, right? The 2024 Jenna Cola incident, which for context John Ocala, is this town in Finland and one morning, they just woke up to find their entire mobile Communications. Grid dead. A massive telecommunications Tower had completely collapsed, right? But the report stresses that it wasn't a Cyber attack. Nobody hacked into a Mainframe or you know, Used military Ordnance know. The perpetrators use physical tools likely just basic bolt cutters or maybe a battery powered angle grinder from a hardware store. That's insane. Well, think about how these towers are built telecommunication Towers. Especially those really tall ones used for wide area rural coverage. They're often held upright by a network of tension, guy wires, right, the ballast wires. Yeah, these thick steel cables that anchor, the mass to the ground, in a wide radius to counteract wind resistance. Okay? So they didn't even attack the complex electronics at the base. They just walked out into the woods up to the Anchor points, and cut the steel cables. That's it. By severing the tension on just one side gravity and the immense weight of the tower itself to the rest of the work. The masked buckled crashed to the ground and instantly destroyed the antenn. due to a shockingly low Tech physical attack and Think the most unnerving detail in the report is that authorities believe. This wasn't even a state-sponsored sabotage Mission. It was likely just teenagers. Or local vandals. Exactly. And the conclusion, the researchers draw from this is absolutely chilling. Yeah. If a random person with hardware store, tools can sever the communications for an entire town. In a matter of minutes, the terrestrial grid is fundamentally indefensible against a coordinated hostile. State actors right. Centralized infrastructure. You know, fixed Towers on a map that you can physically walk right up to is just an inherent vulnerability, right? Because you can't post a military guard at every single cell tower in a country. You just can't. So, if the ground is that fragile, you are forced to look somewhere else. You may have to abandon the ground which is exactly what led Meeka and his team out into the freezing Wilderness to test the sky, right? They needed a decentralized solution so they turn to low earth, orbit satellites, but critically, and this is what makes cepes approach. So brilliant, they didn't test this in some control and Helsinki. No, not at all. But between December 2 0. 4 and March 2025 said, be conducted this grueling series of field tests to see if a commercial starlink system could truly function as the backbone of a nation's emergency broadcast grid. And the sheer geographical scale of this field test is just wild. It's massive like they started in the extreme North at the Raja Giuseppe border crossing, and they went all the way down to the volume across in the Deep South and the documentation points out that the physical distance straight down between these points is about 860 kilometers, right? But if you are actually driving those winding, winter roads, it's closer to 1180 kilometers of travel. Wow. And just to put that in perspective for you listening, that is roughly the distance from Seattle all the way down to San Francisco. Or, you know, if you are in Europe from London to Barcelona, They were dragging this fragile satellite equipment across a massive slice of the earth during the harshest darkest months of the year. Well, but testing across, that vast spread was absolutely vital for this statistical Integrity of the research. Why is that? Because earlier tests back in 2023, had been conducted in Western Finland. Yeah. But at that time, starlink hadn't actually deployed enough satellites in polar trajectories yet to ensure Mission critical up time at high latitudes. Ah, okay, alright, so by testing at these extreme northern and southern points, simultaneously sepi could actually prove whether the newly launched polar satellites provided a seamless continuous blanket of coverage over the entire Sovereign territory. Okay, that makes sense. But to me the distance still isn't the craziest part of the methodology, it is the highly specific locations. They chose the Border Station, right? They didn't just go to random snowy Fields. They went to active and some closed border stations directly adjacent to Russia. Yes. And the documentation is very clear, it says it's certain testing. Points, the Starling dish was operating less than a single meter from the physical Russian borderline. It's bold. I I honestly struggled to comprehend the audacity of this because we are talking about the winter of 2025. This is in the direct literal shadow of the ongoing war in Ukraine. Why on Earth? Would you risk deploying in advanced Western satellite communication device literally inches from a hostile superpower? Well, it reveals the intense geopolitical anxiety. That's actually underlying This research. Okay, they were looking for an invisible digital wall. What do you mean? So Starling as a corporate entity, utilizes geofencing, right to restrict where work exactly. They use GPS bounding boxes and internal cellular logic within the satellite terminals themselves to ensure their services entirely deactivated within the borders of Russia complying with International sanctions, okay? So, sappy wanted to know if that digital fence somehow bled over the physical border. Precisely that if the Fencing logic was even slightly imprecise a civilian dish operating just a few meters inside. Finland might mistakenly register as being in Russia and just instantly shut down. Wow, furthermore, they were testing the resilience against active signal jamming, right? Because in an active conflict Zone hostile forces, Elevate, the radio frequency noise floor, they essentially screaming on the exact same invisible frequencies. The satellite uses just to drown out the signal and they needed to know if that jamming would bleed across the border and knock out the Finish responders. Yes. Because if an emergency happens on the border, the military and the broadcasters are going to be standing right on the border. It doesn't help anyone if the backup system, only works 10 miles Inland. Exactly the field test was specifically designed to find the absolute edge of that digital cliff. And what did they find the results? They gathered were profound the discovered? No Boundaries. Yeah, the starlink service remained completely stable continuously tracking satellites and pushing heavy data. Even while physically brushing up against a territory, where the system is strictly prohibited and actively aggressively suppress. That is wild because I honestly expected a commercial dish, like something you just buy off a website to completely Buckle under the weight of an emergency broadcast. Sure. I mean, a home internet connection is one thing, but running a national radio and television feed. How did the actual performance numbers look when they pushed it? Surprisingly fantastic. Yeah. And the physics of low earth orbit, provide a massive Advantage here compared to older Tech, okay? Traditional geostationary satellites. The big ones we used to use orbit at about 35,000 kilometers above the Earth that's really far, right? And because the data has to travel, that massive distance up and back down you inherently suffer a ping or latency of about 600 milliseconds. And that delay makes Live two-way broadcasting incredibly jarring, right? It's like watching a news. Anchor, ask a field reporter. A question And the reporter stares blankly at the camera for a full second before answering. Exactly. That awkward pause but Leo satellites like the Starling constellation the orbit much much closer typically around just 550 kilometers up. Oh Wow. Yeah, because the physical distance is so much shorter. Sepe logged, median latency times of just 50 to 55 milliseconds. That's nothing right. That is virtually indistinguishable from a standard terrestrial, fiber connection. And what about the actual speed could it handle a heavy data load like video? The bandwidth was ample in these freezing remote conditions, they recorded download speeds ranging from 150, to 350 megabits per second and upload sitting nicely between 20 and 35 million piece. Wow, the researchers noted, this is more than enough overhead to seamlessly. Push a 4K video live feed straight from the field. That's incredible and for radio broadcasting which requires significantly less data. They calculated, you could run 100 of high-quality audio streams simultaneously on a single consumer dish. Okay, now you mentioned a term earlier I saw in the sources that I really want to clarify Jitter adaptation. Yes, the report says modern broadcasting software can use this to handle satellite inconsistencies what? Exactly Is Jitter and how does the software fix it? Okay, so when you send data over a network, it gets chopped into tiny little packets. Right in a perfect world, those packets arrive at the destination in a perfectly. Steady Rhythm, extreme bum bum bum. But a satellite network is highly dynamic. The dish on the van is constantly switching. Its invisible connection from one satellite zooming overhead to the next one coming over the horizon, right? Handing it off exactly and that handoff causes microscopic delays in packet delivery. That variance in a rival time. The fact that it's not perfect rhythmic. It has called Jitter. Okay? So the data is arriving but it's stuttering correct. But modern broadcasting software uses Jitter adaptation which is essentially a dynamic digital buffer above. Yeah. It holds the first few incoming packets, for just a fraction of a second before actually playing them out loud. Creating this tiny invisible reservoir of data. Oh I see. So if the network stutters for a millisecond during a satellite handoff the software, just pulls from the reservoir, smoothing out the transmission. So the listener at home. Never actually Hears A Drop in the audio. That is so smart. Okay, so the technical specs are fantastic. They are, but this brings me to a massive point of friction that I had while reading this. Okay. If you are a sovereign nation state, And you have acknowledged that the ground is vulnerable to basic sabotage and you need a highly resilient satellite Network. Why on Earth are you relying on a commercial product? You can buy at a retail store, great. Why not? Deploy heavily encrypted ruggedized. Proprietary military-grade Hardware. It does seem highly counterintuitive. Right? To trust National Security to a consumer Gadget, but the research specifically, addresses this, why not a military grade solution question? And the answer is deeply rooted in a very realistic understanding of human psychology during a catastrophe, right? Because sepi argues that in a true crisis the person actually turning the equipment on probably won't be an IT expert or a military Communications officer exactly the report explicitly states that the end user could just be a random civilian Or a local Municipal worker or freelance journalist. Who just happens to be the very first person on the scene. Yeah, keep in mind from the remote border, crossings where they tested the nearest mid-size city is a two-hour Drive. Oh wow, you cannot wait two hours for a highly trained military. Technician to arrive and establish a comms link. The crisis is happening. Now you know this makes me think of an AED like an automated external defibrillator. Well that's a perfect comparison. Yeah. Like you see the mounted on the walls and airports and train stations. It does not matter how incredibly Advanced the medical technology inside that boxes. If the interface requires a medical degree to operate, the patient is going to die while you wait for a cardiologist. Exactly. The genius of an AED is that you open the box and a synthesized voice. Literally tells a completely Panic bystander, exactly where to place their hands. It has to be dead simple. That is a phenomenal and elegy for sepi's exact philosophy because a military grade satellite terminal often requires inputting Complex decryption keys, my it requires aligning the dish manually using coordinates and navigating proprietary clunky software under the extreme stress of a crisis, literally shivering and negative 27 degree weather. A civilian cannot operate that you just frees up literally and figuratively. Starlink conversely, utilizes a phased array antenna. Wait okay. What does that mean a phased array? Because I noticed it doesn't physically spin around to find the satellite, right? Right. It has small motors to tilt itself initially just to get a good angle but the actual precise tracking is entirely electronic. Okay. A phased array contains hundreds of microscopic antennas laid out on a flat panel. By slightly altering the timing which is the phase of the radio waves, emitted by these tiny individual antennas, the dish can electronically steer its signal beam across the sky. That is so cool. Yeah, it can track a satellite moving at 27,000 kilometers now, an hour without the physical dish. Needing to move a single millimeter. You literally just plug it into a power source. And it does the rest autonomously. It is entirely Plug and Play exactly. And there's a logistical genius to use using commercial gear too, right youpi? Yes. The supply chain advantages. Absolutely massive here because there's so many of them, right? If a proprietary military spec cable snaps, in a remote location, you have to requisition A specialized replacement from a central defense Warehouse, which takes days. But if a consumer satellite cable breaks, you can potentially scavenge or replacement from a nearby town, a, local electronics store or honestly, even a neighbor's house. Wow. You are essentially turning the commercial retail supply chain into a massive decentralized National stockpile that is brilliant. And you can really see this incredibly pragmatic boots on the ground reality in the quarks they discovered during these field tests. Oh, yeah. My favorite detail in the report, was about the antenna heading because the official instruction manual for starlink written by engineers in California tells the user to point the dish, either north west or south west, right? But when sepi's team actually set it up out in the snow and Northern Finland, that didn't work Optimally at all, know they discovered that the actual physical truth of the network in that highly specific geographic region. Required the antenna to be pointed at exactly zero degrees. North just straight more straight North. And you only learned that by completely ignoring, the corporate manual and testing it in the mud or, you know, in this case the snow and then there was the physical mounting, they strapped this thing to a 3.8 meter metal pole on the side of the transit van. I initially assumed that was just to get the dish above the tree line to see the sky better. A lot of people assume that but no, yeah, the engineering logic was entirely focused on unpredictable human behavior. Okay? How so, they mounted it at 3.8 meters specifically so that emergency Personnel, could comfortably walk underneath it. Walk underneath it. Why does that matter? Because gigahertz radio, waves are highly susceptible to being absorbed by the water in human bodies. Yes. If the dish is sitting on the ground every single time a panicked responder walks past it, their body, absorbs some of the signal, the broadcast degrades. That's crazy. Now, a traditional overthinking engineer, might try to solve that with complex frequency filtering or digital correction right. Sepi solved it by just putting the device on a really tall stick that perfectly encapsulates. His quote from the source material, it's so good. He says the success of an innovation should be measured by the quality of the problem. It solves, not the sophistication of how it solves it. Is such a refreshing way to look at technology. It really is. And to truly appreciate how elegant this entire preparedness planet is. I think we have to examine the mind that offered it, right? Because he yes, because the sources provide quite a bit of background on him and his resume explains exactly why he approaches National Security issues like a rogue audio engineer rather than a traditional defense contractor. Well, he is currently the head of technology for Freeman, right? Which is the tech branch of the Collins group? Yes. But critically from 2024 to 2025, he was a technical producer for radio Swami at Yale The Finnish Broadcasting Company, right? And in his notes he describes his work as sitting at the intersection of predictability and creativity. Yeah. He explicitly says he passionately hates things that work by accident. Yes, and his specialty seems to be these fully autonomous Media Solutions. The sources, mention his development of an engine called a 26, which drives a platform known as Air corps, right? And apparently, this was born from a realization. He had while literally sitting in these remote freezing locations. He realized humans were just wasting valuable time on manual. Repetitive technical tasks. Sure. So he built a fully autonomous radio platform that manages all the technical execution itself, freeing the actual humans to focus on the journalism and the crisis management and the designed something called Obi-Wan. Oh, yeah, which is fascinating. So outside broadcast Van's The massive heavy trucks that new stations used to broadcast in the field. They are incredibly expensive. Yeah. And they require a highly specialized technical crew to operate right. They're huge. So Obi One is his solution to that. Yeah it's a cheap virtual replacement that literally fits in a small case. He claims. It does everything a million dollar van does but the on-air Talent could just set it up themselves. Wow again, we see this Relentless obsessive focus on removing the technical barrier for the end user. Which brings us to a story from his background notes that I just loved it. Perfectly illustrates this Rolling Stone, philosophy of engineering. He has it's the story of the phase canceled audio problem. Oh, that is a fantastic example. And I'm gonna need you to explain the actual physics of it for everyone listening, right? What exactly is a double mono 180 degree phase difference, okay? So think of an audio signal as a physical waveform like ripples in a pond, okay? It is Peaks where the sound pressure is high and it has troughs where the pressure is low, right? Right now in a standard stereo audio file, you have a left Channel and a right channel, a double mono file just means the exact same audio is playing perfectly on both sides, like listening to a podcast where my voice is exactly the same and your left ear and your right ear correct. Now, imagine taking the right channels waveform and flipping it completely upside down. Okay, so every time the left channel has a peak going up, the right channel. Has a trough going down of the exact same size. They're perfectly opposite in audio engineering, this is called being 180 degrees out of place, okay? So what happens if you actually listen to that? Well if you listen on stereo headphones one in each year it sounds very strange and wide but you can still hear the audio, the absolute catastrophe happens. If those two channels are ever mixed or summed back together into a single mono Channel. Why? Because when a peek going up meets an inverted, trough going down at the exact same size. They mathematically cancel each other out to absolute zero. Wow, The result is pure dead silence, there is no audio and the media house seppy was working at had a recurring nasty bug where this inverted out of phase. Audio would accidentally get pushed to the live broadcast change. Yes. And it caused total panic because the Studio's off air monitor, which is the physical speaker. The radio presenter uses in the booth to listen to what is actually going out over the airwaves that monitor was a mono speaker. Oh no, it was summing the left and right channels together, right? So the presenter would be talking into the microphone but the monitor would output Dead Silence. The presenter would assume the entire National broadcast system had failed. And they'd start making these panic phone calls to the engineering department. Meanwhile anyone listening at home in their car on a mono FM. Receiver was also just hearing dead are exactly. Now, a traditional sophisticated engineering response to this problem would be to purchase a rack of very expensive. Dedicated, Hardware phase meters. Or to install complex Digital Signal processors that constantly analyze the phase correlation across the entire broadcast chain. Basically throw a massive budget at the problem, right? But happy rejected that he didn't want to be on call 247, just to push a phase invert button. Whenever this random bug occurred, so he looked at the architecture and realized the audio was passing through a web browser interface at one specific point in the chain. So he just wrote a remarkably basic JavaScript widget. How did a snippet of web code fix a live audio broadcast? The code simply intercepted. The audio node right in the browser. It mathematically added the sequential digital samples of the left and right channels together, okay? If the resulting number was negative, which mathematically proves the waveforms are inverted and currently canceling each other out. The code simply multiplied, one of the candles by -1 it just flips. The upside down wave, right side up. Automatically automatically in real time, right before it reached the monitor of the transmitter. That is so smart. It is notes. Sepi describes this exact code as being like a stone rolling downhill. What does he mean by that? Well, he admits, it wasn't elegant, it wasn't some sophisticated multi-layered algorithm But gravity dictates that a stone rolling downhill will eventually inevitably reach the bottom right. The code just worked silently and perfectly. Every time the Panic phone calls stopped entirely. He clearly has zero tolerance for technology that demands unnecessary human attention, which reminds me there's a fantastic critique hero in the sources about microwave ovens that highlights this exact mindset perfectly. Oh yes, his thoughts on the endlessly, beeping microwave. So funny. He writes in his notes, Someone somewhere decided the world needed a microwave oven that beeps continuously until you physically remove the food thoughtful in theory, but I don't think there are many people who genuinely forget, they put something in the microwave and if they did, they probably weren't that hungry to begin with. It is a very funny observation, but it actually reveals the absolute core of his design ethos right technology. Should not nag. You, it should not hold your attention. Hostage, you fundamentally believes technology should act as a quiet, extension of human thought, like a trusted colleague, who anticipates, exactly what you need without, requiring a whole conversation about it, which is exactly why a commercial. Starlink dish is the ultimate crisis tool for him. It doesn't nag you for decryption Keys, you plug it in, and it quietly finds the satellites, exactly. But as much as we love this, we do have to look at the dark side of this. We do state preparedness means we cannot just celebrate the Ingenuity. We have to ruthlessly interrogate, the vulnerabilities, if we abandon the fragile ground Towers. We are basically just trading terrestrial vulnerabilities for orbital ones that's entirely accurate, the research explicitly identifies, four major risks to relying on a low earth orbit Network. These are the failure states that could bring this entire theoretical broadcast grid crashing down. Okay, let's break these down because they're fascinating. The first threat is literally the oldest enemy of electrical engineering, the sun. Yes, the report notes, the sun has been giving us headaches for 4.6 billion years. The specific threat here is solar flares or coronal mass ejections, right? These are massive eruptions of plasma, and ionizing radiation straight from the Sun surface. Now down here, on the ground, the Earth's magnetic field acts as these massive Invisible Shield deflecting the worst of this radiation away from us, right? We just get pretty northern lights out of it. Exactly. But satellites in low earth orbit are operating on the very outer edge of that protective bubble. When a severe solar flare hits the Earth. It interacts with our upper atmosphere causing the atmosphere to actually heat up and physically expand outward into space. Wait, so the atmosphere gets thicker right? Where the satellites are flying? Yes, and this drastically increases the atmosphere drag on the satellite keep in mind, there are moving at roughly 27,000 kilometers per hour. Right. When they hit that thicker, are the experience, massive friction, they lose orbital velocity and gravity simply pulls them down to burn up in the atmosphere. Wow. Plus the ionizing radiation itself can physically flip the bits in The Satellites computers instantly corrupting their navigation systems and the research points out. That this isn't just a hypothetical fear in early 2022, a solar storm hit right after Starling had launched a new batch of satellites. And the increased drag caused dozens of them to just fall right back out of the sky and burn up. And the timeline of this specific research is critical here, the sun operates on an 11-year cycle of magnetic activity, the expected peak of the current cycle. We call the solar maximum is occurring right now. Across 2024 and 2025, oh wow, this means the statistical risk of catastrophic solar weather degrading. The constellation is currently at its highest point in over a decade. So the sun is actively trying to melt the network basically. Okay. Risk number two is a bit more localized to orbit but it's arguably scary because it is entirely a man-made problem space debris. Yes, This introduces, the concept of the Kessler syndrome. Low earth orbit is quite frankly rapidly becoming a high-speed landfill. Yeah, it is littered with dead satellites, spent rocket booster stages and literally thousands of fragments of metal from previous collisions. We tend to think of space as you know, empty, but the math behind this is terrifying. How fast is this trash? Actually move-in well orbital velocity in. Leo is about 7.8 kilometers per second per second. Yes, if two objects cross paths and opposite directions, the closing speed is astronomical because kinetic energy equals one half mass times. Velocity squared, the velocity is the dominant destructive factors at those speeds and object, the size of a fuk of paint carries the exact kinetic energy of a bowling ball. Moving at highway speeds, a flag of speed. Yes, a small metal bolt will completely shatter a satellite upon impact and the Kessler syndrome is a chain reaction, right? It is an exponential Cascade if a dead rational weather satellite collides with an old American rocket body, they don't just you know Dent each other right? The hyper Vel. He shatter creating thousands of new completely untraceable, shrapnel. Fragments those fragment spread out and Destroy, other satellites. Creating millions of fragments the fear is that a single major Collision event. Could trigger a Cascade that renders lower Earth. Orbit entirely impassable for Generations, which would instantly destroy the entire starlink network. The report does mention that humanity is developing methods to clear some of this debris but it clearly remains a massive sword hanging over any EO dependent strategy. Okay, let's move back down into the atmosphere, for the third risk, the weather Specifically water. You mentioned earlier that human bodies block gigahertz signals because we are mostly water. What happens when the sky fills with water, you experience, what's known as rain fade. Rainfall, it's a fundamental physics problem regarding the electro. Magnetic Spectrum commercial satellite internet operates on high frequency gigahertz bands. Specifically the coup in Cobb bands, the physical wavelength of these radio signals happens to be very very close to the physical size of a raindrop. Oh really? So the interact physically. Yes. When a gigahertz radio wave hits a water molecule in the air. It causes the molecule to vibrate which generate the microscopic amount of heat. Okay. The radio wave is literally transferring its energy into the water. This is called molecular resonance. So the signal is actively absorbed by the rain or by wet heavy snow falling low in the atmosphere. So, during a heavy, Rainstorm in Finland, the signal from the sky just gets soaked up before it even reaches the dish on the van precisely the signal attenuates. Meaning it heavily weakens For the end user, this manifests as drastically reduced bandwidth and severe package hitter, right? And while you cannot engineer your way out of the weather, it is at least meteorologically predictable that's true. Which allows State broadcasters to temporarily scale down their video quality during a known storm just to keep the vital audio feeds running. Okay. So we have the sun orbital trap. No, and rainstorms. The final vulnerability is arguably the most complex because it involves human geopolitics and tagging us and sovereignty. Yes, the report States very clearly that hostile entities will always seek to disrupt critical Communications. But the much deeper vulnerability here isn't just active signal jamming on the border, but is it it is the corporate origin of the network itself. Starling is earned and entirely operated by a private commercial entity based in the United States, right? And for a sovereign European nation, handing the absolute keys to your emergency broadcast infrastructure. To a foreign corporation is a massive geopolitical gamble. It is the ultimate question of digital sovereignty, If Finland relies entirely on an American System, their National Security becomes deeply dangerously entangled with foreign corporate policy US government regulations and honestly the personal whims of the corporations ownership. Yeah. If the political winds shift across the Atlantic, the service could be degraded or geo-fenced entirely without the Finnish government. Having any recourse whatsoever, which perfectly explains this highly emphasized section and the research suggesting that European equivalents are absolutely necessary for the long term. Yes, they explicitly mention that testing of the Airbus one web system which is a European operated satellite constellation began in the spring of 2025 specifically to ensure the EU retains control over its own Digital Life lines. Exactly it's about maintaining Sovereign control but looking at all four of these massive risks, I have to push back a bit on the core premise of this entire deep dive, okay. It's here we started by looking at how fragile a cell tower in John Ocala is Because a random teenager with a bolt cutter. Can knock it down but if we migrated the emergency broadcast network to the sky, a solar flare can fry. The hardware, the orbit is filling up with hypervelocity trash. That could trigger a Cascade failure. A heavy rainstorm chokes the bandwidth and the entire system is controlled by a foreign corporation. Yes. Are we genuinely any safer relying on a Leo satellites, then we were relying on terrestrial Towers. It is a totally valid critical challenge to the research. But the philosophy of true State preparedness isn't about discovering an invincible Flawless technology, okay? Because every single engineering solution, whether terrestrial orbital has a defined, failure state. So if everything is flawed, what is the actual strategy here? The strategy is overlapping redundancy through, non unified systems Sun unified systems. Yes, if your State's only plan relies on centralized, ground Towers, you have a singular catastrophic point of failure, When the towers fall, the state goes completely dark. But if you maintain those terrestrial towers and you actively deploy a massive Fleet of decentralized commercial, Leo satellite Terminals and you integrate a European alternative like one web You create a highly resilient diverse ecosystem of survival. Possible for a teenager with a bolt cutter, a massive solar flare, and a corporate policy shift to all happen. At the exact same millisecond, precisely the final conclusion of the report summarizes beautifully. He says, being prepared for the worst means. We're prepared for anything. Wow, the goal isn't to avoid failure entirely that's impossible. The goal is to mathematically ensure that no single Vector a failure is fatal to the nation's ability to communicate, you know, that completely reframes, the entire experiment for me. Yeah, it is about layering imperfect, highly pragmatic Solutions on top of each other until they form an unbreakable safety net. Exactly it really synthesizes the entire Journey we've explored today. I mean, we started by analyzing those centralized vulnerable cell towers in the woods. We move to that freezing border crossing in various placing a dish. One single meter from Russia to test the physical and geopolitical limits of a commercial Network. And we unpack the realization that keeping A society, informed during a total collapse, doesn't actually require a multi-billion dollar. Military apparatus know it requires an off-the-shelf commercial dish on a 3.8 meter. Pole, chosen specifically, because a panic civilian can turn it on without a manual acting as an intuitive extension of their own thinking. It is genuinely a masterclass in human-centered, engineering. It really is, but before we wrap up entirely you touched on the issue of corporate ownership earlier. And I know that Sparks a much larger almost philosophical question about the future. It does the research really forces us to confront a highly uncomfortable modern dilemma. Yeah, we have established that the absolute future of Crisis communication, relies on, Simplicity, ubiquity and orbital technology. But as Sovereign Nations, inevitably abandon their fragile localized. Ground infrastructure to rely on satellite constellations owned by private. Foreign corporations would happen to the very concept of national sovereignty. That's a heavy question. It is in the ultimate crisis when a nation is fighting for its literal physical survival. Does control of the nation's voice belong to the democratically elected state, or does oblong to the private corporation that owns the sky. That is an incredibly complex and honestly slightly unnerving thought to leave on. But it is exactly the kind of invisible reality. We need to be analyzing next time you connect to a network, take a moment to consider the immense fragile infrastructure, you are relying on, where it lives, who controls it, and what your backup plan is, if it all suddenly goes quiet, Thank you for joining us on this deep dive until next time.