(Credit: Rob Pegoraro)
Access to in-flight Starlink Wi-Fi in the US is still pretty limited. Only Hawaiian Airlines and the boutique air service JSX offer SpaceX's satellite broadband, and few people’s travel plans overlap with those carriers’ route maps.
But United Airlines is now about to put Starlink into service, less than eight months after announcing that it had inked a fleetwide deal with SpaceX to purchase that firm’s low-Earth-orbit satellite constellation for free onboard connectivity.
United’s first Starlink flight for paying passengers is scheduled to depart on May 15, a 7:35 a.m. hop on an Embraer 175 regional jet from Chicago to Detroit. On Thursday, I hopped on a press-preview flight that demonstrated the Starlink access coming to a growing number of United's regional jets, followed by its larger aircraft.
Speedy and Steady
United flight 5180, a 72-minute excursion on an E175 from Chicago O’Hare International Airport and then back to O’Hare, allowed more than 50 journalists and social-media influencers to try out Starlink in a frenzy of downloading and streaming.
We also used that bandwidth in a way that United doesn’t want to see on revenue-service flights: making a lot of video calls. The “rules of the sky” shown on United’s sign-in screen remind passengers that “calls are prohibited by federal law.”
(They also require using headphones and instruct passengers tempted to stream content that neighbors might find “offensive”—you can guess what kind—to choose something else.)
The system provided more than enough bandwidth for those otherwise-verboten video calls, as tested in Signal and FaceTime. Ten runs of Ookla’s Speedtest app on a Google Pixel 9 Pro yielded average download speeds of 94.65Mbps, average upload speeds of 16.79Mbps, and an average ping time of 53.7ms.
Speeds did fluctuate a bit, leading Chrome to flash time-remaining estimates for a download of LibreOffice’s 348MB installer to flip up and down and momentarily spike at 10 hours before the file transfer wrapped up in just under 15 minutes. But the overall experience across a variety of apps was barely distinguishable from what I’d experienced on the Wi-Fi in a United lounge before the press flight.
By way of comparison, I ran the same benchmarks in that speed-testing tool on my United flight Thursday morning from Washington to Chicago. The broadband beamed down to that Airbus A320 from a satellite 22,000-plus miles up in geostationary Earth orbit was considerably slower and laggier, with downloads averaging 14.54Mbps, uploads at 4.09Mbps, and latency at 775ms.
That slow uplink would have made one of my inflight tests, uploading a 499MB video of our takeoff to PCMag’s Slack workspace, implausible to impossible.
The Starlink connection as tested on that Pixel 9 Pro as well as a 2022-vintage HP Spectre x360 and an Apple iPad mini 6 also stayed remarkably consistent even as that Embraer jet banked through a series of turns. With conventional inflight Wi-Fi, that kind of maneuver usually causes a signal drop-out until the antenna atop the plane can lock in on the far-off satellite’s signal again.
Starlink’s massive constellation—now up to 7,400 working satellites in orbits about 350 miles up, per the count maintained by astronomer Jonathan McDowell—surprised me with only one noticeable hiccup, a Speedtest error that interrupted one test in that app.
Another glitch was not a surprise, because I'd encountered it using Starlink on a Qatar Airways flight from Washington to Doha in February: the site for the Private Internet Access VPN service would not resolve. Changing DNS settings in Windows to use Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 service fixed that.
And unlike the slow, soon-to-be-retired air-to-ground Wi-Fi system on United’s other regional jets, which only operates above 10,000 feet, the Starlink signal on this Embraer worked from gate to gate.
Free With Ads
United’s implementation of Starlink did, however, impose a form of latency that doesn’t exist on its current Wi-Fi system and its tiers of free and paid service.
Whether you opt for free messaging, claim the T-Mobile subscriber benefit of an hour of free connectivity per flight, or pay $8 for full-flight access as a member of United’s free MileagePlus program ($10 for everyone else), getting online takes little time if you’ve saved your United login in a password manager.
With United’s flavor of Starlink, the login experience comes with extra steps that include watching two video ads.
Connecting to United’s usual unitedwifi.com network will open a screen showing those “rules of the sky,” after which a click or tap of the “Get started” button should open the United app on your phone or tablet for a faster sign-in or take you to a MileagePlus sign-in page in your browser.
On each device, logging in then treated me to two silent ads: a 30-second spot for Marriott, followed by a 17-second spot for United’s Chase-issued credit cards.
Those commercial messages are not a huge departure from United’s current passenger experience. On planes with seatback screens, the required screening of the airline’s safety video is followed by an ad for IHG hotels and another one for United itself, and few United flights don’t feature flight attendants making their own credit-card pitch.
But it is something new for inflight connectivity, and it doesn’t match the one-click connection I enjoyed trying JSX’s implementation of Starlink on a press flight two years ago.
Since those ads only play after you’ve signed into your account, you might see a different set of spots. Before the press flight, United MileagePlus CEO Richard Nunn observed that Starlink’s low latency will allow the airline’s Kinective Media ad platform to make near-real-time ad-personalization decisions.
There’s no option to pay for access instead of authenticating with a MileagePlus account, even if you have to create one from your seat “It's a sign-up or sign-in model,” Grant Milstead, United’s VP for digital technology, said in a post-flight conversation in the jetway. “We've made sign-up very easy.”
There’s no limit on how many devices you can connect per flight. If you sign in with your phone first, you should be able to scan a QR code shown on the sign-in page of other devices to whisk them online, but United’s Android app crashed when I tested that.
The Competition
Unlike Starlink’s on-the-ground residential broadband, which has to compete with such growing alternatives as fixed-wireless 5G and even new-build fiber, Starlink inflight Wi-Fi is in an altitude of its own.
Amazon’s upcoming Project Kuiper low-Earth-orbit constellation will support inflight Wi-Fi but looks years away from commercial service. And the only other low-Earth-orbit satellite inflight option available now, the OneWeb system that Air Canada has begun deploying on regional jets to positive reviews, is a vastly smaller constellation than Starlink’s.
Meanwhile, the free Wi-Fi already available from United’s competitors Delta and JetBlue—to be joined early next year by American Airlines when it makes inflight connectivity free across much of its fleet—relies on older geostationary-orbit satellites with the same speed and latency issues as United’s older connectivity.
United does have to refit hundreds of aircraft, but that work appears to be going quickly. In March, United announced that Starlink installation times were averaging eight hours per plane. On Thursday, executives said every two-class regional jet will have Starlink onboard by the end of the year.
(A regional jet with Starlink will feature a flat antenna barely protruding from the top of the fuselage; you can also track this deployment on the United Express fleet spreadsheet maintained by a group of aviation enthusiasts.)
United also plans to have Starlink on its first mainline aircraft but did not offer further details on timing. The airline also hasn’t set a timeframe for adding Starlink to the smaller, economy-only Embraer 145 and CRJ-200 regional jets that today have no Wi-Fi at all.
Another thing remains unclear about Starlink: how much collateral PR damage Elon Musk can inflict on the service with his cultivation of extremist voices on X, gleeful destruction of federal workers’ careers, dismantling of many US foreign-aid efforts and evasion of federal privacy rules governing Americans’ data.
Asked whether it was helpful to have Musk be the public face of Starlink, United’s Milstead waved off the question. “We're not focused on that,” he replied. “We're focused on the technology and the customer experience.”
But United also didn’t have much choice in connectivity upgrades. Said Milstead: “It's the technology that can scale with an airline the size of United.”
Disclosures: United covered the cost of the press flight. Ookla, meanwhile, is owned by PCMag's parent company, Ziff Davis.