"The Night They Tried to Kill the Sky".
The most important number in geopolitics right now is not a death toll, a missile count, or a sanctions figure.
It is 1.3 kilobits per second.
That is the bandwidth required to transmit the message that brought eighty-five million Iranians to their windows at exactly 8:00 PM on January 8, 2026. The message was simple: chant together, death to the dictator, wherever you are. It occupied less storage than a single pixel of the videos Starlink was designed to stream. And when Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps activated the most sophisticated electronic warfare campaign ever deployed against a commercial satellite constellation, achieving packet loss rates between thirty and eighty percent across the country, that message got through anyway.
H/T: Instapundit
This is an overlooked aspect of modern communications: you don't need fancy graphics or digital gimmicks to send information.
ReplyDeleteIt helps, but it's not necessary.
Time was, long distance radio communication was very limited bandwidth, yet an awful lot of information was passed.
Fact: if you are in a situation where the cellular system is overwhelmed (and that happens all too often), and you can't make a voice call, send a text message. Keep it short, but the system will keep on trying to send it .... and will eventually succeed.