United Airlines Expected To Replace Terrible Wifi With Starlink—Is The Best Inflight Internet On The Way? – View from the Wing

For years I’ve avoided flying United Airlines whenever possible knowing that the inflight wifi would be so bad that the hours on board would be completely devoid of productivity.

With retrofits of United interiors, including seat back entertainment screen and bluetooth connectivity for headphones, new bigger overhead bins, and touches like new LED lighting and refreshed lavatories it was expected that all planes would get ViaSat wifi which had been the gold standard in the industry and a mainstay of many American and Delta aircraft.

ViaSat Speed Test

However, while United has been working to improve its wifi and airline CEO Scott Kirby has even talked about offering free wifi like Delta and JetBlue once they have sufficient bandwidth – free means people use it more and United’s wifi could barely keep up (and often couldn’t keep up) with paid wifi – plans changed. It was reported back in May that United was looking at Starlink as inflight wifi provider.

Referring here to the rumor that Starlink is in the running. As one source (who has no connection to UA, simply peering in from the outside, as it were) says: “It’s only a matter of time until Starlink gets a major carrier” And very clearly UA has been looking at if they…

— JonNYC (@xJonNYC) May 20, 2024

Now aviation watchdog JonNYC says that United is close to an announcing a deal with Starlink.

and, well, I know it’s the best choice intellectually, but I still hate to see it, personally, on a solely visceral level– yes, I fully assume it’s going to be Starlink.

— JonNYC (@xJonNYC) September 5, 2024

Having seen Starlink perform first on JSX and more recently on Hawaiian I can say that it really is the best inflight wifi product by a lot. Beyond faster speeds, it just has very very low latency. The technical aspects of it are outside my area but signals just don’t have as far to travel with the satellites in low earth orbit. Installations can be done in a single overnight period.

Incredible. I’ve gotten as much as 80 Mbps down on this @flyjsx flight with @SpaceX #Starlink internet.

It’s like working in my office at home… while airlines generally don’t even put internet on their ERJ-145s at all. pic.twitter.com/BlAF6UKRIG

— gary leff (@garyleff) March 7, 2023

I’ve seen reports of 200 Mbps download speeds and uploads much faster as well. United could quickly go from industry laggard on wifi to the top of the charts. And while my United wifi experiences have been better than they were 5 years ago, though not quite consistently good enough, this could be a game changer for inflight productivity moving them completely from do not fly into preferred carrier territory.