Airplane wi-fi is a nightmare.
Its expensive, slow, and spotty.
United Airlines and Starlink may soon change that.
A United Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8 departs from Los Angeles International Airport en route to San Salvador on September 1, 2024 in Los Angeles, California.© Photo by Kevin Carter/Getty Images
And itll be free.
Theres 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 Musks satellite-based internet services work by beaming the signal from a broadcast in low Earth orbit.
Slap a Starlink antenna on a plane and youre good to go.
At six miles up in the air, suddenly the receiver is very close to the source.
United Airlines isnt the first airline to use Starlink, just the most recent.
JSX and Hawaiian Airlines both use the service and the people whove 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.
She was even able to scrub through a Netflix video and take a Zoom call without hiccups.
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