Free and much faster inflight Wi-Fi on United Airlines is now taxiing to the runway. The Chicago carrier announced Sunday that it’s accelerating its Starlink installation and plans to start testing it in February before a first commercial flight in the spring.

SpaceX's satellite broadband will see its revenue-service debut at United on an Embraer E175 regional jet. The airline then aims to finish deploying Starlink across two-cabin United Express regional jets before putting Starlink on the first of hundreds of mainline Airbus and Boeing jets "before the end of this year," it says.

In other words, United is tackling the planes with the worst Wi-Fi first. Among the four connectivity options the airline offers, most of the regional jets operated by other airlines under United’s name use an old air-to-ground Gogo Wi-Fi system that only works above 10,000 feet. That leaves passengers offline for large chunks of the shorter routes those planes fly.

(The smallest regional jets flying for United, Bombardier CRJ-200 and Embraer ERJ145 planes with only an economy-class cabin, have no Wi-Fi today. United’s press release doesn’t cite a timetable for putting Starlink on those aircraft beyond a commitment that it will “ultimately” put Starlink on its entire fleet; airline publicists did not offer further details when asked.)

United won’t charge for this connectivity but will require an account in its MileagePlus frequent-flyer program; Delta implemented a similar policy when it made inflight Wi-Fi via older services free starting in 2023.

To judge from what I saw when I tried out inflight Starlink on a press flight hosted by the boutique carrier JSX in 2023, the upside for United passengers should be enormous. On that short hop out of Dallas, downloads averaged 126Mbps and uploads 7.6Mbps, with ping times of 54 milliseconds.

Even allowing for the light load of only 17 people on that flight, those uplink speeds and ping times in particular vastly improve on what you get from inflight Wi-Fi provided via satellites parked in geostationary orbits, some 22,000 miles up.

That’s the Wi-Fi you’ll get on a mainline United flight, subject to coverage limits with two of the airline’s current providers that can leave you offline during parts of some flights: Thales only works in and near the continental US, while Viasat’s service reaches North America, the North Atlantic, and Europe.

United’s current Wi-Fi is also not free, although it is cheap on domestic routes at $8 for a full flight, with the option of at least an hour of free connectivity for T-Mobile customers. United charges $20 and up on international flights.

Starlink’s vast constellation of satellites—6,176 as of Friday, per the count maintained by astronomer Jonathan McDowell—occupy overlapping orbits of about 350 miles up that allow worldwide service. And the service has so far required airlines to offer connectivity at no charge.

United’s announcement in September that it would adopt Starlink followed earlier moves by Hawaiian Airlines, Qatar Airways, Canada’s WestJet, and the European regional carrier airBaltic; Air France has since also said it will begin deploying Starlink this year.

Since SpaceX launched the first Starlink satellites on one of its Falcon 9 rockets in May 2019, Starlink has found an enthusiastic audience among residential users who had no viable broadband at home before. Frequent growing pains notwithstanding, Starlink has held a spot near the top of PCMag’s Readers’ Choice list of top ISPs every year since 2022. SpaceX also sells Starlink connectivity to business jets and cruise ships and private yachts and has opened a beta test of its direct-to-cell roaming service for T-Mobile customers.

By: DocMemory
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