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 10 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 10 months ago
Nurse_Robot@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Yeah, their coverage is hugh
snausagesinablanket@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Y U G E N E T
crsu@lemmy.world 10 months ago
So are their pings
bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
Hugh Mungous
Evilcoleslaw@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Probably Hughesnet or Viasat.
Linkerbaan@lemmy.world 10 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 10 months ago
It could have even been one of those multi SIM router things that has network redundancy.
postmateDumbass@lemmy.world 10 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 10 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 10 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.