United Airlines is adding free Starlink wifi to its planes over the coming years. They’ve updated the install timeline. Based on experience with Hawaiian Airlines and JSX, it should be faster – and with far less latency – than competitors’ wifi.
The airline now expects to begin testing Starlink next month with the first commercial flight anticipated to take off this spring on a United Embraer E-175 aircraft. United now plans to outfit its entire two-cabin regional fleet by the end of this year and have its first mainline Starlink-enabled plane in the air before the end of this year.
Ultimately, United will add Starlink to its entire fleet.
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.
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.
United’s announcements previously suggested that the first install in passenger service would be the late 2025 mainline, but moving regional jet service up earlier is fantastic.
It will take time for United’s fleet to see the new fast, free inflight internet. 1,000 aircraft is a lot to deploy, even taking just a single overnight per airframe to install (and not wanting to limit schedules in the meantime taking planes out of service). But it’s a future we can now look forward to. Once fully deployed this will put United ahead of Delta and JetBlue (which offer reasonably fast, free wifi today) and ahead of American (which offers reasonably fast wifi, priced more expensively than any other U.S. carrier).
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