Starlink internet can't come soon enough... Seems like the only real technical solution. (In some of these places a political solutions seems to be centuries off...)
Starlink doesn't talk directly to handsets, so you'd still need a pretty large and noticeable antenna that would draw unwanted attention from the local authorities. If this style of censorship works by raising friction for your typical internet user, well your typical internet user is also not going to import a large and expensive transceiver from abroad.
I could see expats bringing a Starlink system with them into a country with questionable internet to maintain a low latency VPN connection to company servers back home, but that's about the only people that would or could use Starlink. Even Musk has said that Starlink doesn't have the bandwidth to provide service for all the users that might want to access it from an urban area like Beijing.
From my understanding, as Starlink density increases, the needed antenna should get a bit more simple and more compact. Since the satellites are intended to be geostationary, you should be able to use a very directional antenna which will also save on size versus a radome or dish.
I suspect users will also grow clever and learn how to hide antennas - more out of aesthetics than anything - which will help. More than a few Ham operators have figured out that a regular fence can hide a very large coaxial antenna.
You're going in the opposite direction of what starlink is at least based on what I heard. Starlink isn't geostationary, it's LEO. That's how they get latency down to something comparable to your typical broadband network because wireless signals don't have to travel up to geostationary orbit and back. However, LEO satellites orbit faster than the earth's rotation, so you need a whole web of mini satellites to ensure that as one satellite dips below the horizon, your antenna can switch to another satellite that's orbiting past. As you said, this needs a very directional antenna that can track a satellite. Antennas get larger the more directional they are, not smaller. I have doubts Starlink can shrink their phased array antennas smaller than their current pizza box without a host of other issues. Also, authorities aren't going to be looking for starlink antennas by sight. They'll be flying drones around listening for unauthorized wireless transmissions on starlinks frequency bands and homing in from that. Ask those ham operators how well a fence can hide their antennas from the FCC if they decide to start a pirate radio station.
Woops, you're correct re it being non-geostationary. This is what I get for reading too quickly.
Actually if the satellites are moving you may not want a heavily directional antenna since that adds in a fair bit of mechanical complexity. There are several antenna designs which have relatively wide radiation patterns, but that depends on the needed strength.
> They'll be flying drones around listening for unauthorized wireless transmissions on starlinks frequency bands and homing in from that
That would obviously work for detection, but would be complex and expensive. I would be surprised to see such complexity from the CCP in short order unless Starlink turns out to really disrupt the firewall in a widespread way.
Check out how phased array antennas work. No mechanical parts needed. Those things are used to precisely track missiles in defense systems. The accuracy and versatility will blow your mind.
A phased array pizza box would be significantly easier to hide than an omnidirectional pirate radio station, but point taken. Maybe you could set something up that watched for drones within the line of sight and shut off the connection quickly if anything breached the fence.
At this point you're getting to a level of technological sophistication that would make widescale adoption in authoritarian countries unlikely. The whole point of the article is that you don't have to completely block something, just make it too annoying to use for the average person.
Edit: actually, an even easier solution for the government would be to perform uplink jamming of starlink satellites. Any satellite that orbits into sight of an authoritarian regime gets a directional antenna pointed at it that pumps noise into its receiver and keeps it from detecting base stations on the ground. Once it orbits out of range it continues to operate as usual. Since no satellites are damaged and only operation above the authoritarian country is effected (since starlink operates at LEO and each satellite only sees a small part of the Earth's surface, compared to jamming a geostationary satellite that would knock out service on an entire side of the planet) there would be significantly less political pressure to stopping this jamming.
