When Iranian internet slows to a crawl or drops entirely, audio is the last channel to survive — a Farsi news bulletin needs a fraction of the bandwidth of a video stream, and radio waves need no internet at all. This guide explains, in practical terms, how to keep Radio Farda, Iran International and other Persian news radio reachable when the network is degraded: which low-bandwidth streams to pick, which shortwave and satellite frequencies still carry Farsi programming, and how to prepare before the next disruption.
Internet disruptions in Iran are rarely a clean on/off switch. Far more often the network is throttled: DNS resolution is slow, TLS handshakes time out, video refuses to buffer, and image-heavy pages never finish loading. In that environment a live audio stream is uniquely resilient, because a mono speech stream at 32–64 kbps needs roughly one-twentieth of the bandwidth of a 720p video and recovers gracefully from packet loss.
Radio also has a second life entirely outside the internet. Shortwave, medium wave, and satellite radio carry Farsi-language news into the country without touching an ISP at all. Households that keep a cheap battery radio in a drawer have a fallback that no throttling policy can reach — and that fallback costs less than a takeaway meal.
The practical strategy, then, is layered: use the lightest possible online stream while the network holds, and know your offline frequencies before you need them.
Most Persian broadcasters publish more than one stream bitrate. News stations such as Radio Farda and Iran International offer speech-optimised feeds designed for weak mobile networks, while music stations run higher-bitrate stereo streams that need a steady connection. On a degraded network, always start with a news or talk station: even if a music stream stalls constantly, a speech feed will often play through without interruption.
FarsiRadio.com is built with this scenario in mind. The player is a lightweight browser page with no autoplay video, no heavy ad scripts, and no forced downloads. Each station carries fallback stream URLs, so when a primary CDN edge becomes unreachable the player automatically retries a backup rather than failing outright. If a station stalls repeatedly, use the next-station control — moving to another news source is usually faster than waiting for one stream to recover.
A few habits make a real difference on a bad connection: close other tabs and apps that compete for bandwidth, prefer mobile data or Wi-Fi depending on which is behaving better at that moment, and give a stream fifteen to twenty seconds to buffer before deciding it is dead. Reloading too aggressively restarts the handshake and often makes things worse.
Radio Farda, the Persian-language service of RFE/RL and VOA, broadcasts 24 hours a day with hourly news bulletins mixed with Persian and international music. Beyond its website and live stream, Radio Farda has historically been carried on shortwave and medium wave into Iran, and on satellite platforms widely used across the region. Exact frequencies and transmission schedules change with the season — shortwave propagation differs between summer and winter schedules — so the reliable habit is to check the broadcaster’s own published frequency schedule while you have connectivity and write it down somewhere offline.
Satellite is the steadiest non-internet option for many households, because the audio subcarrier of a satellite TV package often carries radio services alongside television channels. If a household already has a satellite receiver tuned to Persian-language channels, the same receiver can usually park on a Farsi radio service using very little power and no internet.
On the internet side, Radio Farda’s live audio stream is available through this site’s player, which means you get the same feed without loading the broadcaster’s full media-heavy website — a meaningful saving when every kilobyte counts.
Iran International is primarily a television broadcaster, but its audio feed is the part worth reaching during a shutdown: it delivers the same rolling news at a fraction of the data cost. Listening to the audio-only feed rather than the video channel can be the difference between following the news and staring at a spinner. Iran International is also carried on satellite across the region, so the same receiver logic above applies.
It is worth having more than one news source queued up. Diaspora stations such as London Persian Radio and KIRN 670 in Los Angeles broadcast Farsi-language talk and bulletins from outside the country on ordinary international CDNs, which sometimes remain reachable when a heavily-targeted domain does not. Radio Hamrah and Radio Yar likewise mix talk and music from diaspora studios. Redundancy across several stations is far more useful than optimising a single one. When audio streams are throttled rather than blocked outright, video sometimes stays reachable when radio does not — live Persian TV channels are worth trying as a fallback.
Almost everything useful during a shutdown has to be set up beforehand. Install FarsiRadio.com to your home screen as a Progressive Web App — on iPhone via Safari’s Share → Add to Home Screen, on Android via Chrome’s menu → Install app. Once installed, the app shell is cached on the device, so the interface loads instantly even on a network too slow to fetch a fresh page, and only the audio stream itself has to come over the wire.
Write down the shortwave and medium wave frequencies for the stations you rely on, together with their broadcast times, and keep that note on paper or in an offline notes app. Charge a battery or hand-crank radio and confirm it actually tunes shortwave, not just FM. Agree with family members on which station everyone will default to, so nobody wastes a scarce connection window hunting for a link.
Finally, treat battery as a resource. Audio-only listening on a locked screen with the display off uses a small fraction of the power that video does, which is exactly why radio has outlasted every other broadcast medium during infrastructure failures for the last century.
FarsiRadio.com is a directory of publicly broadcast, freely available radio streams. It links to and plays streams that broadcasters themselves publish for public listening, and it does not host, record, or redistribute copyrighted programming. Nothing in this guide describes evading security systems — it describes choosing lower-bandwidth streams and using ordinary broadcast radio, both of which are simply how radio has always worked.
Listeners should always use their own judgement about their circumstances. If a broadcaster asks that a stream not be relayed, we remove it: the site maintains a public takedown process, and requests are actioned promptly.