Airplane wi-fi is a nightmare. It’s expensive, slow, and spotty. For years, getting online while in the air meant spending a lot of money and dealing with all the problems or simply abandoning the internet for a few hours. United Airlines and Starlink may soon change that. The air company just announced it’s adding the wi-fi service to all of its planes over the next few years. And it’ll be free.
“Everything you can do on the ground, you’ll soon be able to do onboard a United plane at 35,000 feet, just about anywhere in the world,” United CEO Scott Kirby said in a press release.
There’s a litany of reasons in-flight wi-fi sucks. The most basic is that the devices accessing the internet are far away from the signal sending it. Starlink is a perfect solution to that problem. Elon Musk’s satellite-based internet services work by beaming the signal from a broadcast in low Earth orbit. Slap a Starlink antenna on a plane and you’re good to go. At six miles up in the air, suddenly the receiver is very close to the source.
United Airlines isn’t the first airline to use Starlink, just the most recent. JSX and Hawaiian Airlines both use the service and the people who’ve used it say the difference is dramatic. In a September 4 video, the Wall Street Journal reported on the brave new world of in-flight wi-fi. On a jet from Dallas to Houston, the WSJ reached speeds of more than 100Mbps across multiple devices.
In the video, the Journal’s Joanna Stern spread ten different devices in front of her and streamed video from all of them. It worked fine. She was even able to scrub through a Netflix video and take a Zoom call without hiccups. In its press release, United Airlines promised the network would work so well that people will be able to game over it.
Musk’s various consumer products have a dicey product history, but Starlink is generally praised by anyone who has ever used it. It’s not a replacement for wired, ground-based, internet services but it’s an incredible option for people trying to get online in remote areas like, say, the cabin of an airplane. The service has also been a huge boon to Ukraine, which has used it for battlefield communications in its war with Russia.
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