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.
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.
Why would they need data then? For GPS you can get a 1metre accurate chip for like 20 bucks and it’s way smaller.
Mapping out network topology? Who knows.
Whatever the collected data was, it could have been sent to their satellites for long haul back home.
paraphrand@lemmy.world 6 months ago
It could have even been one of those multi SIM router things that has network redundancy.