On 8 January 2026, the Iranian government imposed a near-total communications shutdown. It was the country’s first full information blackout: for weeks, the internet was off across all provinces while services including the government-run intranet, VPNs, text messaging, mobile calls, and even landlines were severely throttled. More than 90 million people were cut off—not only from the world, but from one another.
Since then, connectivity has never fully returned. After U.S. and Israeli airstrikes in late February, Iran again imposed near-total restrictions, and people inside the country again saw global information flows dry up. In the aftermath, Misryoum newsroom reporting has been tracking how new workarounds are moving from the margins to the center of digital survival.
The January blackout didn’t land in a vacuum. It came amid nationwide protests over the deepening economic crisis and political repression, where millions chanted antigovernment slogans in the streets. While Iranian protests have become frequent in recent years, this was one of the most significant uprisings since the Islamic Revolution in 1979. The government responded quickly and brutally; one report put the death toll at more than 7,000 confirmed deaths and more than 11,000 under investigation. Many sources believe the death toll could exceed 30,000.
Thirteen days into the January shutdown, NetFreedom Pioneers (NFP) leaned on a system it had built for exactly this kind of moment—one that sends files over ordinary satellite TV signals. The technology, called Toosheh, delivered real-time updates into Iran, offering a lifeline to millions starved of trusted information. The details sound almost mundane—like tuning a dish and waiting for your TV to do something it shouldn’t—but the human impact, in practice, is anything but.
To understand why Toosheh could slip past controls, you have to look at how Iran’s network is built. Censorship in Iran has long relied on leverage points in centralized infrastructure. Misryoum newsroom reporting describes a setup where most international traffic passes through a small number of gateways controlled by state-linked telecom operators, giving authorities unusual control: restrict those connections, and global access can drop sharply. Iran also uses a domestically routed system called the National Information Network, designed to keep data inside the country whenever possible.
Toosheh’s workaround starts with something Iran already had in abundance: free-to-air satellite TV. Unlike subscription services, these broadcasts are unencrypted and can be received by anyone with a dish and receiver. Tech-savvy users can use a DVB card to turn a personal computer into a satellite receiver—then capture and store what’s broadcast. Toosheh’s founders built on that idea. The system is credited to Mehdi Yahyanejad, an Iranian-American technologist and entrepreneur who cofounded NetFreedom Pioneers in 2012. He proposed that satellite-computer connections enabled by a DVB card could be re-created in software, removing the need for specialized hardware. From there, the NFP team developed a transfer protocol that tricks ordinary satellite receivers into downloading data alongside audio and video content.
What makes Toosheh especially hard to stop is also what makes it feel a bit like magic to outsiders: it’s downlink only. A satellite receiver can’t tell the difference between the data and normal satellite audio and video, since it only “sees” MPEG streams rather than what’s encoded in them. Misryoum newsroom reporting says the system is private in the operational sense too—there are no traceable logs of user activity. And rather than delivering internet access, Toosheh provides curated data through satellite technology. Users don’t make requests like they would in a browser; they receive prepackaged bundles of content—often described as 1 to 5 gigabytes—delivered in a magazine-like format.
Of course, there’s a catch. Because Toosheh relies on one-way broadcasts, it evades many of the usual tactics governments use to block internet access, but it remains vulnerable to satellite signal jamming. Misryoum editorial desk notes that Iran has used multiple jamming approaches, including uplink interference in 2009, which was eventually stopped in 2012 due to the risk of international sanctions. More recently, the current method is terrestrial jamming: antennas at higher elevations beam strong noise over specific areas, short-range and power-hungry enough that nationwide coverage becomes difficult.
Even so, NFP built redundancy into the transmission—similar to RAID—sending extra information so missing or corrupted packets can be reconstructed. Under normal circumstances, about 5 percent of bandwidth is used for redundancy; during periods of active jamming, that can rise to as much as 25 to 30 percent to boost recovery chances.
Misryoum newsroom reporting also highlights how Toosheh’s role has evolved. It initially came online in 2015 in Iran and Afghanistan, and its broader value surfaced during the 2019 protests in Iran, when a widespread shutdown showed “technical complexity and breadth.” When that wave settled, some services returned, and people used VPNs again; Toosheh then became more of a public access point for news, educational material, and entertainment beyond government filtering.
The practical story keeps circling back to human moments. In one case described to NFP, a traveling teacher in western Iran regularly distributed Toosheh files to students in remote villages—one package even included footage of female athletes competing in the Olympic Games, something never broadcast in Iran. For a young girl, it was the first time she realized women could compete professionally in sports. She didn’t have to “log in,” didn’t need a connection to someone else, just got the files—maybe while the room smelled faintly like warm dust from electronics, and then later, the TV quietly did its job.
There’s the financial side too, less poetic and more decisive. Misryoum newsroom reporting says Toosheh’s operational cost stays constant regardless of user count, because a satellite can broadcast across a continent. But bandwidth for the service still costs money. NFP received funding from the U.S. State Department, but in August of 2025 that funding ended, forcing it to suspend services in Iran. Then protests in December made broadcasting a priority again; Misryoum newsroom reporting states NFP needed roughly $50,000 a month to turn Toosheh back on. With support from private donors, it sustained operations for a few months, though its future in Iran and elsewhere is uncertain.
Looking ahead, NFP is developing features like intelligent content curation and automatically prioritizing data packages based on geographic or situational needs. It is also experimenting with local sharing tools that let users redistribute Toosheh files via Wi-Fi hotspots or other offline networks, potentially extending reach into disaster zones and conflict areas. There’s even a separate track: after the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan, NFP designed a satellite-based system for educational materials aimed at enabling private, large-scale distribution of coursework—including for girls banned from schools. The system is technically ready but has yet to secure funding for deployment.
For now, Toosheh remains a reminder that “resilience” doesn’t always mean building something bigger or more complicated. Sometimes it’s just delivering data through the sky—quietly and affordably—when the ground-level internet is intentionally gone.
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