Like home internet, but on a plane

High-speed internet from the skies is coming to… the skies. On Tuesday, Starlink, SpaceX's satellite internet arm with ~3,500 satellites in orbit (and counting), unveiled its wifi services for planes.

📶✈️ A deeper dive… The satellite internet service and equipment, available for pre-order with delivery sometime next year, promises in-flight speeds of up to 350 Mbps per plane, with a latency as low as 20 ms. Which is to say – streaming, video calls, online gaming, and other high-data activities should work smoothly for each passenger. But all that speed comes at a cost. A one-time hardware cost of $150,000, plus monthly service fees ranging from $12,500/month–$25,000/month, to be exact.

But, but, but – Starlink’s internet speeds are over 3x as fast as other existing in-flight wifi providers (and that’s being generous).

• Gogo, a satellite internet company and the dominant provider of inflight connectivity for business jets with >80% market share, offers peak speeds of 70 Mbps per plane.
• Other in-flight wifi companies offer air-to-ground systems, which top out around 10 Mbps per plane (barely even enough for passengers to check email).

🛰️ In the know: While existing services like GoGo use satellites in distant orbits, Starlink’s satellites orbit closer to Earth, boosting speeds passengers can see in-flight. Though, unless you’re taking a spur-of-the-moment trip next year to forget Sarah Marshall, us normies will have to wait to experience it.

Starlink Aviation pre-orders are only available to private jets – for now, at least. But Hawaiian Airlines announced a deal with Starlink in April that’ll see the satellite internet provider’s service installed in its planes sometime in 2023.

• More airlines could be coming soon. Delta confirmed earlier this year that it had conducted "exploratory tests" of Starlink for its planes.