I tested Starlink’s Wi-Fi on a United flight. Finally, we have a real internet in the sky

United Airlines has now started offering in-flight offers Starlink Wi-Fi service on its flagship aircraft covers US and international flights to Canada and Mexico.

It started with a short flight today that took a planeload of journalists from Chicago to Milwaukee and back on a test flight. I packed my bag and headed to the Windy City to see if the satellite Wi-Fi provider makes a difference.

At a time when our phones and smartwatches have satellite calling options — helping us reach emergency responders or send text messages when we’re out of cellular signal range — Starlink and United offer travelers cutting-edge convenience. What’s more, we get Wi-Fi on board with speeds and connections that rival what we experience at home or the office.

Air travel presents a dilemma: If you need Wi-Fi in the air and it doesn’t work, you’re at risk. There’s no need to venture out to a coffee shop hotspot or reboot your home router. Onboard Wi-Fi has improved over the years, but there is still a risk as to whether it will work well or not. And you won’t find out until you’re actually in the air.

The plane I traveled on is not the first United plane to carry Starlink’s satellite Wi-Fi equipment. United has begun preparing many of its products Embraer E175 regional jets in March after Sign a deal With Starlink’s parent company, SpaceX, last year. Although it’s United’s inaugural flagship aircraft, Hawaiian Airlines got the jump late last year when it outfitted its Airbus jets with the technology.

The Boeing 737-800 I flew entered active service on October 15, starting with a flight from Houston to Fort Lauderdale. Over the coming months, United expects to equip approximately 15 Boeing 737-800 flagship aircraft per month with Starlink antennas.

United offers free Starlink Wi-Fi to United MileagePlus members. The standard Wi-Fi option costs $8 or 1,600 miles for MileagePlus members, or $10 for everyone else. Subscriptions for frequent flyers start at $49 per month (or 7,500 miles).

Onboard Wi-Fi is what the experience is all about

Believe me, I want to talk about speeds, bandwidth, and what a Starlink connection could mean for getting work or entertainment done over the air. But it all starts with communication, and more often than not, that experience is bad.

On my flight from Seattle to Chicago the day before the demo, United’s standard Wi-Fi network took nearly an hour to connect to any of my devices. (United uses different ISPs depending on the aircraft and area of ​​operation, and this flight was connected by satellite ISP ViaSat.) Once the main menu page loaded, most options, including “Sign In” and “Free Messaging,” timed out with an error stating there was no network connection.

It cut into my work time, but more importantly, it was extremely frustrating. Many of us look forward to focusing time during a flight to get things done without interruption, and more frustration is the last thing we want to add to our air travel experience.

Two experiences stood out while I was on board the Starlink-equipped aircraft. First, it works gate-to-gate, so you can connect on your phone or tablet (laptops still need to be put away during takeoff) as soon as you’re settled into your seat. After we landed and headed back to the portal, I forgot I was still connected via Starlink.

For almost as long as I’ve owned a cell phone, lowering the wheels meant it was time to turn off Airplane mode and embrace the familiar connection to the local cellular network.

Second, the few login steps I had to follow were no more difficult than accessing a public café or hotel Wi-Fi. After connecting to United Wi-FI, a portal window opened with three screens explaining how great the new service was (you can skip it) and a field to enter my United MileagePlus account and password.

Oh, and then there’s a video ad that’s 15 seconds or less. (If you’ve read so far and thought, “Wait, it can’t really be free, right?” here’s your answer.) This announcement turns out to be important: You’re not online until the video is complete.

I got impatient and dismissed the ad on my laptop, which resulted in some connectivity issues. Another journalist on the flight reported experiencing the same situation, and the friendly United technical staff on the flight were curious to know if the ad had been played when they helped me diagnose the problem. I also emptied my browser cache and told the computer to forget Wi-Fi, which caused me to start from scratch.

As far as I can tell, no one else on the flight has had this issue, but it’s safe to say there are still some bugs being worked out before launch. United’s technical support will not be available for scheduled flights, which is why someone said they are trying to iron out any spots where travelers may have difficulty.

Once connected, I could focus on trying to use as much bandwidth as possible and look outside occasionally since United scheduled this flight on a beautiful fall day (instead of bringing everyone to Chicago in the dead of winter).

How Starlink Wi-Fi performed

The device that makes this happen is a pair of 500Mbps low-level antennas mounted on the top of the fuselage. Unlike current units on planes that provide standard Wi-Fi, the antennas are essentially exposed to communicate with a network of nearly 8,000 Starlink satellites operating in low Earth orbit (LEO), or about 350 miles at altitude.

For comparison, the antenna module on a non-Starlink-equipped United plane parked at the next gate was much larger to protect its antennas, which need to be angled during flight to talk to satellites at high altitudes about 22,000 miles away.

In the time it takes for a signal to travel from an airplane to high-altitude satellites, a signal can travel the distance between the plane and the Starlink satellites 70 times, according to Mara Balcisko, United Airlines’ vice president of engineering and reliability.

(This is also different from T satelliteStarlink-powered satellite technology provided by T-Mobile. T-Satellite uses a separate set of satellites to work with Phones Using part of the cellular spectrum.)

What does that mean in terms of online experience? Honestly, I’d think I was at home on my high-speed internet if it weren’t for the cabin noise and the occasional extreme banking fluctuations. I streamed Cowboys & Aliens via Netflix on my iPad, played one of United’s available videos in a window on my MacBook Pro, and watched YouTube videos on my iPhone.

Also, since this was a private trip for the press and several United employees, I had a video call with two of my colleagues. Normally, video and voice calls are not allowed – in fact, They are illegal United is keen to tell customers that they should not engage in any behavior that disturbs the people around them, including calls, listening to audio without headphones, or watching media that would make others uncomfortable. You can watch a live call, but technically you can’t talk in it, which is the behavior that flight attendants must implement.

In this case, we were encouraged to move on, so I held a hard-to-hear video conference with CNET managing editor Patrick Holland and chief correspondent David Lomb (maybe it’s time to invest in a pair of… AirPods Pro 3). The video quality was excellent — no, I’m not messing with Starlink, I promise — even better than some of the recent calls we’ve made at our offices. A FaceTime call with a friend was similar: clear, sharp video with no obvious broadcast artifacts.

But let’s get to the numbers. It’s always a pleasure to go to SpeedTest.net or launch the SpeedTest app and be surprised by the numbers it sends back. I consistently got around 250Mbps of download speed and anywhere from 25Mbps to 65Mbps of upload speed. I’ve seen this on all my devices: iPhone 17 ProThe M1 iPad Pro and MacBook Pro 2021 with the M1 Pro chip.

To put that into perspective, SpaceX says Starlink residential internet gets download speeds of up to 350 Mbps, depending on location. According to UCLA reportStarlink’s average performance is 105Mbps download, 15Mbps upload, and 45ms response time. CNET senior writer Joe Subban saw similar performance when testing it recently Starlink mini In the North Cascades Mountains of Washington. (Disclosure: CNET’s parent company, Ziff Davis, also owns Ookla.)

To make what now seems like an unfair comparison, when I got United’s standard Wi-Fi service the night before (for which I paid $8), my speed was 9.65 Mbps down and 1.03 Mbps up. Yes, those decimal points are in the right places.

Streaming video, whether you’re watching movies on the plane, or binge-watching a series Netflix or Apple TV Or watching live sports will undoubtedly become more common on flights when this level of bandwidth is available. In fact, when I spoke during the flight with Grant Milstead, United’s vice president of digital, I wondered whether the in-flight videos available through the United portal were cached on an on-board server. (On my flight the night before, I was able to see those images even when my internet connection was elusive.)

For major flights, carrying approximately 170 passengers, the company will still reserve those local servers for redundancy, he said. But the Embraer E175 regional jets, the first in United’s fleet equipped with Starlink technology, rely on streaming content without local backup. Given that the video and audio quality are, in my view, indistinguishable from home broadband, this comes as no surprise.

While waiting for my flight home (on a plane not equipped with Starlink Wi-Fi), I thought about my lasting impression of this mission, which saw me fly to Chicago, fly over Wisconsin for a few hours and then return to Seattle.

On my ride with Starlink Wi-Fi, I had full internet access. I wasn’t thinking about latency, artifacts, or whether I’d get $8 worth of money. I can work, watch videos, play live video games, and be bothered by none of the usual complications. That was the best experience.