Providing internet access to people currently located in Kazahstan is dispositive of the question “Are you doing business in Kazahkstan?” The only difference the satellite makes is the increase technical difficulty Kazahk authorities would have in physically stopping the ISP.
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Or “Numbers station” in the mobile version for ordinary citizens and one-time pad
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“Slow” is relative.
Transmitting two of these within 3 days comes out at 7.7MB/s (ignoring the read/write time)
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just needs better ping then the mars curiosity rover
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Your transfer speed can drop dramatically when “Packet loss” appears …
Kazakhstan isn’t all borat. And MITM isn’t hard to do at all, you just need to have control of the infrastructure, and they do. Just install firewalls at the network edges and job done.
I was there in 2008 (Astana, Almaty, Chromtau, Oost and surrounds). They have had a lot of investment in recent decades for oil and gas industry, mining, etc.
Walking past a bunch of Mig-31s and Su-27s whilst disembarking at the Almaty airport was pretty cool.
2-way satellite internet (VSAT)would be a way around this (landing in another country - that’s how we did internet out of Voskhod (mine site)) but you need a radio frequency license for that, and no doubt they’ll be controlling those licenses ever more seriously now.
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Also… 2 way VSAT isn’t cheap ( we were paying something like $10k/month for 1 megabit - including the radio frequency license in country IIRC) and not practical for the typical Kazak individual citizen 
It looks like Kazakhstan changed it’s mind:
Kazakhstan has halted the implementation of an internet surveillance system criticized by lawyers as illegal, with the government describing its initial rollout as a test.
Mobile phone operators in the oil-rich Central Asian nation’s capital, Nur-Sultan, had asked customers to install an encryption certificate on their devices or risk losing internet access.
Several Kazakh lawyers said this week they had sued the country’s three mobile operators, arguing that restricting internet access to those who refused to install the certificate would be illegal.
But late on Tuesday, Kazakhstan’s State Security Committee said in a statement that the certificate rollout was simply a test which has now been completed. Users can remove the certificate and use internet as usual, it said.
Apparently the “test” was to prove surveillance disguised as consumer protected is not inconvenient:
Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev said in a tweet he had personally ordered the test which showed that protective measures “would not inconvenience Kazakh internet users”.
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To me that sounds like there may be intention to roll it out fully in the future.
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Well, at least they inform what they are doing. Not much worse than NSA sticking their nose in everything they can, and afterwards deny it.
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