Terminals have to get in-country and there needs to be usable ground stations in the same cell as the terminal. Good luck getting a terminal to Tehran where the police are apparently gleefully destroying satellite dishes. Even if you got an intact terminal there's no ground station nearby.
StarLink has been given special dispensation to operate in Iran. This is not the same as air dropping a warehouse worth of terminals and setting up usable ground stations.
I believe there is no gateway (ground station) problem. It only needs to be in view of the satellite, not in the same cell, and even if there is no gateway in sight, laser backhaul is now operational (see starlink providing service in Antarctica now, https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/14/spacex-satellite-internet-...)
You do need to get the user terminals into the country, though. But once you do, they're easier to hide than a geostationary satellite dish.
A Starlink dish isn't much easier to hide than a Ka-band dish. It would be much easier to set up if taken down though since it's a phased array rather than parabolic. You're right that laser backhaul solves the ground station problem, so long as the track covering Iran has laser backhaul capability.
Too early for this but obviously Starlink's recently announced plans to start offering connectivity to phones in very remote areas would also work wonders for people in countries like Iran. The scale would be an issue obviously. But maybe combined with e.g. mesh networking, it would enable people to bypass government controls.
IMHO, this is the biggest threat to police states like Iran, North Korea, etc. in years. They are very dependent on controlling access to information and breaking through that threatens their power and they have treated the internet as an existential threat by raising firewalls and imposing very strict controls and limitations. However, phones are a weakness. At least so far.
Information is basically a weapon that can be used to influence large amounts of people. The Russians just used propaganda to sell their own population on a war that they wanted to start. That didn't just happen overnight; the propaganda started years ago. That would have been impossible without strict controls on media and freedom of press. Iran, Russia, North Korea, China, and a few other countries are at this point very dependent on controlling access to information. It's a strategic weakness that is exploitable. Break through the information blocks and things start changing.
Besides, installing a Starlink dish is rather visible from the outside and from aerial survey, besides radio-scanning (that most probably isn't happening):
The ground stations absolutely don’t need to be in the same cell. Have you seen the cells? They’re about 50km hexagons. There are 4 ground stations in australia
I wonder how internet quality scales of antenna size. Would a covert antenna with a quarter of the area of a regular antenna give you somewhat usable internet?
It would be possible for Starlink to make more covert antennas. The smaller antennas would just make for a higher noise floor which would lead to more dropped packets. Such an antenna would be usable just lower throughput than the normal antenna.
