One nice thing about Starlink is that they force the airlines to offer it for free. I’m not sure why SpaceX is doing this, but it was surprising enough to me that my international WiFi was not only fast, but completely free that I researched it.
A few more words: they’re struggling to find a niche where their ungodly expensive product makes more sense than the readily available alternatives. In this case, fair play it’s objectively better.
They have several niches where the alternatives are more expensive and worse. Half the RVers in any park have it now. RVing teaches you how much of the country is not covered by cell signal. Boats.
Another one I know first hand: food trucks. I do several events a year where cell signals get overwhelmed and cease to function, but I still have to process my credit cards. I’d say a solid 25% of food trucks are running these now.
>A few more words: they’re struggling to find a niche where their ungodly expensive product makes more sense than the readily available alternatives
pretty obvious you never worked for an ISP and forgot about all the `middle of nowhere` customers who have no high speed internet.
even for me, in houston texas, we cant get fiber to the home and were stuck with AT&T DSL which was like $60 per month and ungodly slow. Also my GF and I both work from home and she does massive file uploads.
had xfinity not been available starlink would be an easy choice. ive tried 5g hotspots and they are not super reliable.
In all fairness, it was a qualified statement: "readily available alternatives". That immediately disqualifies customers stuck in the boonies, or a few hundred feet away from service coverage.
He has readily available alternatives, but they suck.
There are other, far worse forms of satellite Internet, so everybody has a readily available alternative. That makes it not a qualifying statement at all.
In the (relatively) rural area that I live in, the only ISP options available were something like $75/mo for 10mbsp speeds. Starlink was an incredible blessing when it became available. Legitimately feels like magic in comparison to the existing options we had.
It's not that expensive. The Starlink Mini is around $200, and service is $50/mo for 100gb.
I've been somewhat skeptical of the addressable market (doesn't fiber + cell tower network offer good enough coverage?) but I know so many people who have put it on their RV, their boat, or are using it rurally that I've started changing my mind. And the service really is better than cell phone networks, which are far too patchy to provide reliable service at decent speed.
And you can put it on standby mode for $5/mo, so you're not even really locked into $50/mo if you're occasionally doing travel where you want to stay connected.
And in places like Africa, they've had to tightly rate limit new customers because demand is so high.
Probably, because you are now associating your internet browsing with your personal information. (I don't know if they have the sophistication to actually do this, but it is very possible.)
Regardless one of the conditions surely is giving them permissions to sell this to starlink as and everyone else. So whether the information is the same is probably irrelevant, how they are using it is.
On the flip side, the "private" aviation customer is 100% forced into the pricey plans privately with (physical) speed enforcement on the terminals.
There's even two tiers of aviation speed limting: 300MPH ($250/mo) and 450MPH ($1000/mo). They know who they're targeting at both speed points (the guy flying for fun in a prop VS the guy in a Gulfstream that wants to Get There Now).
What sucks is that normal "for fun" prop pilots used to be able to use the basic $50 roaming plan, and then Starlink pulled the rug out from under them by taking it away, instead offering the new plan 5X the cost with 1/5 the bandwidth limit. Total scumbags. You'd expect nothing less from a Musk company. Even your hated local cable company doesn't have the balls to 5X your monthly bill suddenly out of the blue.
Nobody wants their brand associated with price gouging and half-broken in-flight credit card payment portals, and Starlink is better enough than any alternative that they can play hardball with airlines.
Delta is still stubbornly refusing to adopt Starlink.
I've got status with them and have started booking with other airlines b/c it doesn't matter how nice the seats are if you can't get any work done. Most airline revenue comes from business flights, I don't think they realize how important this is to their customer base.
Nobody had a problem with flip phones that play snake or Blackberry physical keyboards until the iPhone was demonstrated, and then nobody could conceive of ever going back (except in niche cases, e.g. journalists loved those keyboards)
Ben Thompson interviewed UA's CEO on Starlink a few months ago.
Scott said: "It took time to negotiate, because we wanted to own the consumer data, and at the beginning, Starlink did, so that was hard, and then, the other thing was I wanted to let my big competitors in the United States finish their deals with other providers and get locked in so that we would — eventually, everyone’s going to have Starlink."
Brilliant. Just brilliant. Ensured that UA would be first (of the 3 major US carriers) to Starlink and that everyone else had to wait until their existing agreements multi-year expired before switching. UA's best CEO in decades!
Even when flying intercontinental for many hours, I usually just pull a Puddy on flights and do nothing. I have my laptop with me, of course, but I usually leave it just in the overhead compartment.
Well, hells bells, next week I'm actually going to be flying on an Alaska Airlines E175. That's quite rare for me, I can't remember the last time I've flown on one of their small planes. And it looks like all of their E175s have Starlink. Sweet! I may have to try it out, even if paying for WiFi on a short flight is generally a waste of money.
Edit: ooh, it's free! Because I have their credit card.
Took me a second to parse that. It says 28 of 28 E175s have Starlink, but what I am hearing you say is that Alaska has more than 28 E175s.
Indeed, wikipedia says their fleet includes 47 E175s. Consider my hopes dashed :(. Oh well, I don't usually bother with wifi on flights that are only a few hours anyway, but free Starlink speed wifi would be fun!
Feature request: Put a disclaimer on the fleet page that the tracking is limited. Or pull enough data to say "28 airframes of 47 are starlink capable" which is what I think most people will be looking to know in the fleet info.
I've definitely thought about substituting a nonstop flight for a 1-stop flight on UA regional jets just to get Starlink on the entire route. The annoying this is I live by a UA hub and UA doesn't fly regional planes between UA hubs.
So the best I've been able to do is a regional flight to a UA hub near me, and then a non-regional flight back to my home airport. Which is honestly probably not worth it. And it's definitely not worth doing a two-stop trip so I'm really excited for them to roll it out on their mainline jets!
Big fan. One feature idea/request - a map showing coverage with 0-100% by route (red/yellow/green lines). I’m just curious to see where I should think to look for / expect starlink options. Probing into a few upcoming trips showed basically no coverage.
Oh that's a cool idea! We wanted to do a variant of this, will add it to the list. The tricky part for us is getting a canonical list of all flights + body types on it.
This is awesome! In the past I would use the promise of starlink or other LEO internet as a tiebreaker for booking flights and was disappointed a few times (as clearly not all of the airframes for an airline have the capability)
Neat problem to work on. The tail number lookup is the hard part and it sounds like you solved it the right way, by finding the people who actually track this obsessively rather than trying to scrape it yourself.
Two questions: how stale does the tail assignment data get in practice, and do you have a way to detect when an enthusiast spreadsheet goes unmaintained? And what happens to your probability estimate when an airline swaps aircraft last minute, which seems to happen pretty often on regional routes?
> how stale does the tail assignment data get in practice, and do you have a way to detect when an enthusiast spreadsheet goes unmaintained?
These are updated almost every day so far, so they seem very up-to-date. Internally we track all changes/removals, so I'm not that worried about spreadsheets being abandoned yet. It's a good thought though.
> And what happens to your probability estimate when an airline swaps aircraft last minute, which seems to happen pretty often on regional routes?
Honestly our estimate right now is pretty crude. At the scale we're at right now it works, but I think you're right that we could make this more accurate by tracking equipment swaps & really drilling into the details of which aircraft get assigned to which routes.
United has this on some flights. It's no cost but they force you watch ads in the captive portal. I'd rather pay the $8 and be left in peace, every time.
Here’s a hack, get yourself a cheap eSIM data only plan from an alternative UK network (VOXI, Talkmobile etc) if you main network doesn’t have connectivity; they will!
looking back at the history of starlink, when was it decided to pursue this project at SpaceX? Was it always the natural evolution, i.e. cheap launches = more communications sats? Or was there a specific communications engineer/person that brought it up to Elon or Gwynne?
I'm not actually sure myself, but I was really surprised to learn how profitable it is. SpaceX made $15b of revenue last year and $8b of profit. Starlink was 60-80% of that!
It turns out the demand for really good internet everywhere is huge.
I had access to it on a long-haul AirFrance flight. While I avoid doom-scrolling in my daily life because there's better stuff to do... on a long haul flight it's a surprisingly good way to pass time intermittently. I still just watched pre-downloaded dropout for 80% of the flight but when I was too tired to appreciate it I'd turn my brain off and watch a bit of that wonderful doom-scroll slop.
The fact that it's powered by starlink is disappointing due purely to Elon Musk's involvement - but this is one of the better use cases for satellite internet technology. I'm not going to go out of my way to book with airlines that use the service though.
Thank you for your service. Hopefully something like this can put pressure on airlines to understand how hostile their internet services are and that it matters.
Last year I flew roundtrip to the Philippines on Philippines Airlines. Each way they claimed they had internet and each time, they sent an email reneging the day before the flight.
The same thing happened when my sister-in-law flew with them a couple months earlier.
These are long flights during which I expected to be able to work. Just so infuriating.
The fact that you're getting downvoted is a great example of why America is in the state it's in. Personally this tool looks like a useful way of booking a flight without financially funding the rise of fascism.
One word: marketing.
Another one I know first hand: food trucks. I do several events a year where cell signals get overwhelmed and cease to function, but I still have to process my credit cards. I’d say a solid 25% of food trucks are running these now.
pretty obvious you never worked for an ISP and forgot about all the `middle of nowhere` customers who have no high speed internet.
even for me, in houston texas, we cant get fiber to the home and were stuck with AT&T DSL which was like $60 per month and ungodly slow. Also my GF and I both work from home and she does massive file uploads.
had xfinity not been available starlink would be an easy choice. ive tried 5g hotspots and they are not super reliable.
There are other, far worse forms of satellite Internet, so everybody has a readily available alternative. That makes it not a qualifying statement at all.
I've been somewhat skeptical of the addressable market (doesn't fiber + cell tower network offer good enough coverage?) but I know so many people who have put it on their RV, their boat, or are using it rurally that I've started changing my mind. And the service really is better than cell phone networks, which are far too patchy to provide reliable service at decent speed.
And you can put it on standby mode for $5/mo, so you're not even really locked into $50/mo if you're occasionally doing travel where you want to stay connected.
And in places like Africa, they've had to tightly rate limit new customers because demand is so high.
Regardless, having free high speed internet on a flight will motivate me as a consumer every time.
About the same work as filling out a hotel wifi login.
But you need to give personal information which also has value.
At most they could see domains, ip addresses, timestamps, and http-only sites (are there any left?)
But the person sitting next to you can see everything.
There are many ways to circumvent that, even while claiming to offer it for free.
There's even two tiers of aviation speed limting: 300MPH ($250/mo) and 450MPH ($1000/mo). They know who they're targeting at both speed points (the guy flying for fun in a prop VS the guy in a Gulfstream that wants to Get There Now).
https://starlink.com/support/article/9839230e-dc08-21e6-a94d...
I've got status with them and have started booking with other airlines b/c it doesn't matter how nice the seats are if you can't get any work done. Most airline revenue comes from business flights, I don't think they realize how important this is to their customer base.
The airlines have no problem with this. T-mobile has no problem with it either.
IF carriers were allowed to charge, they would piecemeal or handicap the service, and passengers would leave with a bad impression.
Scott said: "It took time to negotiate, because we wanted to own the consumer data, and at the beginning, Starlink did, so that was hard, and then, the other thing was I wanted to let my big competitors in the United States finish their deals with other providers and get locked in so that we would — eventually, everyone’s going to have Starlink."
Brilliant. Just brilliant. Ensured that UA would be first (of the 3 major US carriers) to Starlink and that everyone else had to wait until their existing agreements multi-year expired before switching. UA's best CEO in decades!
https://stratechery.com/2026/an-interview-with-united-ceo-sc...
I don't even watch movies or read.
Edit: ooh, it's free! Because I have their credit card.
Not quite sorry, we only track the frames that do have Starlink. But if you check back a few days beforehand you can see if yours matches!
Indeed, wikipedia says their fleet includes 47 E175s. Consider my hopes dashed :(. Oh well, I don't usually bother with wifi on flights that are only a few hours anyway, but free Starlink speed wifi would be fun!
Feature request: Put a disclaimer on the fleet page that the tracking is limited. Or pull enough data to say "28 airframes of 47 are starlink capable" which is what I think most people will be looking to know in the fleet info.
So the best I've been able to do is a regional flight to a UA hub near me, and then a non-regional flight back to my home airport. Which is honestly probably not worth it. And it's definitely not worth doing a two-stop trip so I'm really excited for them to roll it out on their mainline jets!
Oh I actually didn't know this! Do you know why?
Two questions: how stale does the tail assignment data get in practice, and do you have a way to detect when an enthusiast spreadsheet goes unmaintained? And what happens to your probability estimate when an airline swaps aircraft last minute, which seems to happen pretty often on regional routes?
> how stale does the tail assignment data get in practice, and do you have a way to detect when an enthusiast spreadsheet goes unmaintained?
These are updated almost every day so far, so they seem very up-to-date. Internally we track all changes/removals, so I'm not that worried about spreadsheets being abandoned yet. It's a good thought though.
> And what happens to your probability estimate when an airline swaps aircraft last minute, which seems to happen pretty often on regional routes?
Honestly our estimate right now is pretty crude. At the scale we're at right now it works, but I think you're right that we could make this more accurate by tracking equipment swaps & really drilling into the details of which aircraft get assigned to which routes.
I've never paid for hotel wifi and never will, but I don't mind an ad on the captive portal.
I get a better 5g signal on the Jubilee line than I do on an overground train.
It turns out the demand for really good internet everywhere is huge.
https://x.com/greg_wyler/status/1116101020675977218
The fact that it's powered by starlink is disappointing due purely to Elon Musk's involvement - but this is one of the better use cases for satellite internet technology. I'm not going to go out of my way to book with airlines that use the service though.
Last year I flew roundtrip to the Philippines on Philippines Airlines. Each way they claimed they had internet and each time, they sent an email reneging the day before the flight.
The same thing happened when my sister-in-law flew with them a couple months earlier.
These are long flights during which I expected to be able to work. Just so infuriating.
Elon musk did a Hilter salute and had a live stream with the German Nazi party afd
Anti democracy behavior should be enough to not support anything that dude is doing but no....
Just because you do not care about democracy doesn't give you the right to tell me to move on.
Care to tell me why you, probably making good money, care so little about it?