Last Thursday, I boarded one of the first United Airlines planes to be equipped with Starlink’s satellite Wi-Fi. As expected, the Wi-Fi was very fast and left me wondering whether this will herald the end of spotty in-flight Wi-Fi, expensive connectivity fees, or even the quaint notion that we can avoid work altogether while cruising at 30,000 feet in the air.
The test plane was an Embraer E-175, a narrow-body aircraft for regional flights that can fit up to 88 passengers. The flight was short, only about 90 minutes, taking off and landing from the same gate at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. Still, the mood was festive, with several of United’s top executives donning aprons to serve the passengers first-class snack boxes and plastic cups of Champagne.
It used to be that airlines would tell passengers to switch their phones to airplane mode before taking off for “safety reasons.” Now, United is encouraging its customers to browse, stream, and game to their heart’s content thanks to a new partnership with SpaceX’s Starlink.
Last year, United became the first of the big three domestic airlines to announce its plan to add Starlink-powered Wi-Fi to its fleet, with the first commercial flights expected to start at the end of 2025. That plan was recently accelerated, and now United says its first flights with Starlink will officially begin May 15th, starting with the short hop between Chicago and Detroit. The round-trip flight in Chicago was just a test flight, and a chance for United to show off just how fast its new Wi-Fi provider was.
The round-trip flight in Chicago was just a test flight, and a chance for United to show off just how fast its new Wi-Fi provider was.
United assembled an interesting group of passengers for the test flight. In addition to me and a couple other journalists, I saw a few online influencers, a Twitch streamer, and someone from video game publisher Blizzard.
The service works gate-to-gate, as opposed to only working above 10,000 feet, which is a restriction some other systems operate under. As soon as I sat down, I was instructed to connect to the Wi-Fi using United’s mobile app. But first, I needed to sign up for the airline’s loyalty program, MileagePlus, in order to gain access.
To log on, you need to agree to a few rules, such as no voice and video calls, headphones for audio, and no viewing content that others might find offensive. Once you agree to these terms, you can sign into your MileagePlus account to access the Wi-Fi. Fortunately, MileagePlus is free to sign up, and United says it has no immediate plans to charge extra for Starlink Wi-Fi.
Already, this sets the airline apart. Most carriers charge for Wi-Fi, with rates varying from $8 for a domestic flight to $600 for annual connectivity plans. Before Starlink, United’s Wi-Fi was powered by a variety of suppliers, with regional jets utilizing Intelsat (formerly Gogo) and most wide-body jets using Panasonic Wi-Fi. Now, the company says it plans on installing Starlink modems on all 1,026 planes in its fleet, starting with its two-cabin regional jets before moving up to the mainline aircraft.
“We’re bringing Wi-Fi from just like your living room to the skies — whether you’re streaming, gaming, shopping, or working,” says David Kinzelman, chief customer officer at United.
As soon as I was able to connect, I started checking the Wi-Fi speeds. Using Speedtest, I checked the speed multiple times throughout the flight: at the gate, while taxiing, during takeoff, ascending, at cruising altitude, descending, and during landing. I found the download speeds to be very impressive, averaging at 128 megabytes-per-second (mbps), while upload speeds were coming in a little slower at an average of 23.9 mbps. The picture quality was crystal clear, the latency was low, and everything seemed to work quite smoothly. (And just now, I checked the speed of my home Wi-Fi, and yep, Kinzelman’s quote rings true.)
| Scenario | Average download (Mbps) | Average upload (mbps) | Latency (ms) |
| Airport public Wi-Fi | 305 | 249 | 5 |
| Plane, at the gate | 117 | 20.3 | 22 |
| Plane, taxi | 231.5 | 3.01 | 17 |
| Plane, takeoff | 234.8 | 14.9 | 19 |
| Plane, ascent | 192.1 | 18.9 | 23 |
| Plane, cruising altitude | 196 | 27.3 | 19 |
| Plane, landing | 72.6 | 26.1 | 90 |
I surfed the web, scrolled Instagram and TikTok, watched a few minutes of the latest episode of Disney Plus’ Andor, streamed a live soccer game, checked in on CNN’s coverage of the new pope, and even had a video call with Verge supervising producer Vjeran Pavic. But if the prospect of hundreds of people making overlapping video calls on a single flight terrifies you, don’t worry — United said it would discourage its passengers from video conferencing or doing anything without headphones on its Starlink-powered commercial flights.
I found the download speeds to be very impressive, averaging at 128 mbps
The only time I ran into some hiccups was when I tried uploading a few video clips to my Google Drive. What normally would take just under a minute on terrestrial Wi-Fi took almost seven minutes when connected to Starlink’s signal. This isn’t too surprising, given that Starlink itself is less eager about advertising its upload speeds compared to its download rate.
The plane started its descent before I could test out the online play in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe on the Nintendo Switch. But given the speeds I was seeing, I would expect that the chaos and gravity defying tracks would be just as enjoyable as if I was playing in my living room.
United says you can connect as many devices as you want with no degradation in speed. I didn’t bring as many gadgets as Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern did last year, but three devices seems like the sweet spot for most people.
Starlink’s Wi-Fi works better than most other providers because of the sheer breadth of the number of satellites it has in low-earth orbit, which currently stands at over 7,000. While this certainly raises concerns about space debris and over-crowding, it also allows the company to offer Wi-Fi with much lower latency thanks to the shorter distance the signal has to travel as compared to satellites in geostationary orbit.
United isn’t the first airline to integrate Starlink; that distinction goes to Hawaiian Airlines and JSX. But as North America’s largest carrier, the selection of Elon Musk’s satellite internet service is certainly a harbinger of things to come. No word yet on when the airline plans on bringing the technology to its international flights, or how it will factor into the Star Alliance, but United MileagePlus CEO Richard Nunn said there would be more to announce in the near future.
But in case this was all sounding a bit too altruistic on United’s part — blistering fast Wi-Fi speeds, and free? — don’t worry, because the airline is already thinking about how it’s going to monetize all this connectivity.
“What the Starlink connectivity allows us to do in real time, because of the latency and the low earth orbit satellite technology… means that we can make some real-time, less than 100 millisecond ad decisions to serve up in a hyper-personalized world,” Nunn says.
But I’m less concerned about United blasting me with personalized ads as I am about how Starlink’s in-flight Wi-Fi could open up yet another space to remote work. It used to be that I could enjoy a few blissful hours free from constant Slack pings and email notifications while up in the air. This was my time to watch horrible movies that I would never pay to see in the theater or even crack a book for a few hours.
But once terrestrial Wi-Fi speeds while cruising 30,000 feet in the air becomes the norm, we won’t be able to rely on those old excuses anymore. Good luck trying to raw-dog that next flight.
