United Airlines Now Begins Offering Inflight Services Starlink Wi-Fi on long-haul aircraft supports flights within the United States and international flights to Canada and Mexico.
It all started with today's outing, which took a plane full of journalists from Chicago to Milwaukee and back on a demonstration flight. I packed my bag and headed to the Windy City to find out first-hand whether a satellite Wi-Fi provider makes a difference.
At a time when our phones and smartwatches have satellite connectivity, helping us contact emergency services or send text messages when we're out of range of a cellular signal, Starlink and United provide travelers with an increased level of convenience. What's more, we get in-flight Wi-Fi with speeds and connectivity that rival what we use at home or in the office.
Airplane travel presents a conundrum: If you need Wi-Fi in the air and it doesn't work, you're set. There's no need to log into a café hotspot or reboot your home router. In-flight Wi-Fi has improved over the years, but it still seems dicey whether it will work well or at all. And you won't discover this until you're in the air.
The plane I flew on is not the first United plane to be equipped with Starlink satellite Wi-Fi equipment. United began to equip many of its Embraer E175 regional jets in March after signing the deal with Starlink's parent company, SpaceX, last year. Although this is United's first long-haul aircraft, Hawaiian Airlines found success late last year by equipping its Airbus planes with the technology.
The Boeing 737-800 I flew on will enter active service on October 15th, starting with a flight from Houston to Fort Lauderdale. United plans to equip approximately 15 long-haul Boeing 737-800 aircraft per month with Starlink antennas in the coming months.
United offers United MileagePlus members free access to Starlink Wi-Fi. The Standard Wi-Fi option costs $8 or 1,600 miles for MileagePlus members or $10 for everyone else. Frequent traveler subscriptions start at $49 per month (or 7,500 miles).
In-flight Wi-Fi is all you need
Trust me, I want to talk about speed and capacity and what a Starlink connection can mean for getting work or play done in the air. But it all starts with making connections, and too often that experience sucks.
On my flight from Seattle to Chicago the day before the demo, standard United Wi-Fi took nearly an hour to connect to any of my devices. (United uses different Internet providers depending on the aircraft and flight area, and this flight was connected to satellite Internet provider ViaSat.) After loading the main menu page, selecting most options, including “sign in” and “free messaging,” timed out with an error related to no network connection.
It cut down on my work hours, but more importantly, it was incredibly frustrating. Many of us look forward to focusing on the flight to get everything done without interruption, and more frustration is the last thing we want to add to our air travel experience.
This is the first Boeing 737-800 mainline aircraft to be equipped with Starlink on-board Wi-Fi.
When I was on a Starlink-equipped plane, two incidents stood out to me. First, it works gate to gate, so you can connect to your phone or tablet (laptops will still have to be stowed away during takeoff) once you're settled into your seat. After we landed and taxied back to the gate, I forgot I was still connected via Starlink.
For almost as long as I've owned a cell phone, the wheels down have meant it's time to turn off airplane mode and take advantage of the familiar local cellular service.
Second, the few login steps I had to go through were no more onerous than connecting to Wi-Fi at a public café or hotel. Once connected to the United Wi-FI network, a portal window opened with three screens explaining how great the new service is (you can skip them) and a field for me to enter my United MileagePlus account and password.
The Starlink login process includes marketing information that you can skip (just don't skip the ads later).
Oh, and there are also video ads that are 15 seconds or less. (If you've been reading this far and thinking, “Wait, it can't be free, can it?”, here's your answer.) This ad turns out to be important: You won't connect to the network until the video ends.
I was impatient and disabled ads on my laptop, which led to some connection issues. Another journalist aboard the plane mentioned experiencing the same situation, and the friendly United technicians aboard the plane were curious if the ad was playing when they helped me diagnose the problem. I also cleared my browser cache and told my computer to forget about the Wi-Fi network, essentially starting from scratch.
As far as I can tell, no one on the flight encountered this problem, but it's safe to say that some pre-launch errors can still be worked out. United's tech support will not be available on scheduled flights, so one of them mentioned that they are trying to address any issues where passengers may have difficulty.
Once connected, I could focus on trying to use as much bandwidth as possible and look outside every now and then since United scheduled this flight for a beautiful fall day (instead of flying everyone to Chicago in the dead of winter).
How Starlink Wi-Fi works
The hardware that makes this possible is a pair of low-profile 500 Mbps antennas mounted on the top of the fuselage. Unlike current devices on airplanes that offer standard Wi-Fi, the antennas are essentially designed to communicate with the network of nearly 8,000 Starlink satellites operating in low Earth orbit (LEO), or an altitude of about 350 miles.
By comparison, the antenna module on the non-Starlink-equipped United plane parked at the next gate was much larger to protect its antennas, which need to adjust their angles during flight to communicate with high-altitude satellites at an altitude of about 22,000 miles.
The dual Starlink antennas on the United 737-800 are aerodynamic protrusions on the roof of the aircraft.
In the time it takes a signal to travel from an airplane to high-altitude satellites, it can travel the distance between the airplane and the Starlink satellites 70 times, according to Mara Palcisko, United Airlines' vice president of engineering and reliability.
(This is also different from T-SputnikStarlink-based satellite technology offered by T-Mobile. T-Satellite uses a separate collection of satellites to operate phones using part of the cellular spectrum.)
What does this mean in terms of online experience? To be honest, I would have thought I would have felt right at home using the high-speed fiber optic internet if it weren't for the cabin noise and occasional tight turns. I streamed Cowboys and Aliens through Netflix on my iPad, played one of the available United videos in a window on my MacBook Pro, and watched a YouTube video on my iPhone.
Additionally, since it was a special flight for press and several United employees, I initiated a video call with two colleagues. Generally, video and voice calls are not allowed. they are illegal — and United makes sure to tell customers they shouldn't do anything that disturbs others, including making calls, listening to audio without headphones or watching media that might make others uncomfortable. You can watch the live stream, but technically not talk on it, and flight attendants will have to monitor this behavior.
You must agree to United's rules of good conduct when using United's onboard Wi-Fi.
In this case, we were encouraged to go ahead, so I held a video conference, which was difficult to hear, with CNET managing editor Patrick Holland and senior reporter David Lamb (it might be time to invest in a couple AirPods Pro 3). The video quality was stellar—no, no Starlink pun, I promise—even better than several recent calls we've made at our offices. A FaceTime call with a friend was similar: clear, sharp video without the typical streaming artifacts.
Video chat at 35,000 feet in excellent quality over Starlink United Wi-Fi. (Warning: technically illegal.)
But let's get to the numbers. It's always nice to go to SpeedTest.net or fire up the SpeedTest app and be amazed at the numbers it sends back. I was consistently getting download speeds of around 250 Mbps and upload speeds ranging from 25 Mbps to 65 Mbps. I saw this on all my devices: iPhone 17 proM1 iPad Pro and 2021 MacBook Pro with M1 Pro chip.
A sampling of Speedtest readings during a United flight via Starlink Wi-Fi.
By comparison, SpaceX says Starlink home internet offers download speeds of up to 350 Mbps, depending on location. According to Okla ReportStarlink's average performance is 105 Mbps download, 15 Mbps upload, and 45 ms latency. CNET senior columnist Joe Supan observed similar performance during recent testing Starlink Mini in the North Cascades Mountains in Washington. (Disclosure: CNET's parent company, Ziff Davis, also owns Ookla.)
To make what now seems like an unfair comparison, when I got standard United Wi-Fi access (which I paid $8 for) the night before, my speeds were 9.65 Mbps slower and 1.03 Mbps faster. Yes, the decimal points are in place.
Stream video, watch in-flight movies, or watch TV series on Netflix or Apple TV or watching live sports will undoubtedly become more common on flights when this level of capacity becomes available. In fact, when I spoke with Grant Milstead, United's vice president of digital, during the flight, I asked whether the in-flight videos available through United's portal were cached on a server on board the plane. (On my flight the night before, I was able to view them even when Internet connectivity was elusive.)
For long-haul flights, which carry about 170 passengers, the company will continue to maintain local servers for redundancy purposes, he said. But Embraer's E175 regional jets, the first in United's fleet to be equipped with Starlink technology, rely on streaming content without local backup. Given that the video and audio quality are, in my opinion, indistinguishable from home broadband, this is not surprising.
As I waited to fly home (on a plane that didn't have Starlink Wi-Fi), I reflected on my lasting impression of this mission, which took me to Chicago, circling Wisconsin for a couple of hours, and then flying back to Seattle.
While flying with Starlink Wi-Fi, I had uncompromised internet access. I didn't think about the delay, the artifacts, or whether I'd get my $8.00. I could work, watch videos, play live video games, and just worry about any of the usual complications. And it was the best experience.
