Today, many products and services advertise user privacy as a selling point. Very few can be proven to live up to their claims. At FemtoStar, privacy isn't just a marketing promise the user is required to trust we will keep. It's baked into the network at every level - from physical-layer mitigations of low-level attacks, to end-to-end encryption on all connections, to anonymous payment via our credit token system. Don't believe us? FemtoStar's hardware and software are completely free and open-source, and therefore completely open to third-party inspection and testing.

• Verifiable anonymity - In the FemtoStar network, neither users nor their hardware are identifiable to the network. When a user terminal connects to a FemtoStar satellite, it opens an anonymous, short-lived routing session, which is not tied to any identity, location, or other user information. Users don't need any form of user account to use FemtoStar - we don't even offer them.
• Geolocation-resistant by design - Traditional communications systems, such as cellular networks or existing mobile satellite systems, rely on tracking the user's location for basic network functions, such as setting up the connection or handling a moving user. FemtoStar takes advantage of a unique combination of cautious protocol design, low-level terminal-side mitigations, and the inherent properties of satellites to ensure that the location of user terminals never needs to be, and in fact cannot be, determined accurately.
• End-to-end encrypted - While most modern communications systems encrypt traffic over the air, FemtoStar goes a step further. FemtoStar user traffic is end-to-end encrypted, meaning not even the satellite itself can decrypt it. What's more, connections are direct - from user, to satellite, to service. If you're not connecting to a service we provide, our ground infrastructure never handles your data at all - encrypted or not. This also makes FemtoStar inherently net-neutral - after all, if we can't even decrypt your traffic, we can't selectively limit or throttle it either.
• Private payments - An anonymous system isn't truly anonymous if users must still provide identifying information in order to pay for service. FemtoStar's payment system is simple, flexible, and above all, private. User terminals provide cryptographic Credit Tokens to the satellite as they consume service. These tokens can be bought, stored, used, or transferred freely by the user. They are not linked to any form of user identity, they do not need to be purchased directly from FemtoStar, and they never expire (when a satellite validates one, it doesn't even know when it was generated!). Service is priced by satellite resources (beam time) consumed, not by connection duration or data usage, so you won't be charged more for staying connected for longer or for connecting with a faster terminal.