It’s a satellite provider. Cell networks don’t work at that altitude. Starlink was my first guess too but, after some more thought, it could be Hughesnet. They probably have wider coverage.
paultimate14@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I was having a hard time imagining which company this could be. Not that I’m a fan of Verizon or Comcast, but I think they know what side their bread is buttered on. Which one wouldn’t?
Then I remembered Starlink exists.
Joker@discuss.tchncs.de 5 months ago
Nurse_Robot@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Yeah, their coverage is hugh
snausagesinablanket@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Y U G E N E T
crsu@lemmy.world 5 months ago
So are their pings
bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
Hugh Mungous
Evilcoleslaw@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Probably Hughesnet or Viasat.
Linkerbaan@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Don’t think they were colluding with the provider. They probably just put a burner sim card into a 4g module and sent data over a VPN to China whenever it had signal.
paraphrand@lemmy.world 5 months ago
It could have even been one of those multi SIM router things that has network redundancy.
postmateDumbass@lemmy.world 5 months ago
The blurb says primarily for navigation.
So it was using the starlink signals like gps signal and therefore they needed to correlate with the carrier to get a rough time sync.
I wonder what timing data is freely available on the starlink acquisition signal.
Linkerbaan@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Why would they need data then? For GPS you can get a 1metre accurate chip for like 20 bucks and it’s way smaller.
postmateDumbass@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Mapping out network topology? Who knows.
Whatever the collected data was, it could have been sent to their satellites for long haul back home.