Great news for air travelers who've long endured spotty WiFi and dreamed of a better future: United Airlines will start rolling out super-fast WiFi service powered by Elon Musk's Starlink this spring, the company revealed on Sunday. That's a significant acceleration of the original timetable in September's announcement of the United-Starlink deal -- and an important development in major-carrier competition.
United will first roll out the service on its Embraer E-175 jets -- which typically feature 2-by-2 seating in the back and 1-by-2 up front. Initial testing will start in February, with the first Starlink-equipped flight expected to lift off "this spring." United expects its entire two-cabin, E-175 regional jet fleet will be equipped by the end of the year, and that the first flight on a larger plane will happen by the same deadline. Eventually, every one of United's more than 1,000 aircraft will have the perk.
Access to Starlink -- which United described as "the world's fastest, most reliable connectivity in the sky" -- will be free for members of the airline's free MileagePlus loyalty program. That's a change too -- originally, United said it would be free for all aboard. There's no word yet on how the service will be priced for non-members.
Starlink will enable "game-changing inflight entertainment experiences like streaming services, shopping, gaming and more," said United in a press release. "The airline's customers will enjoy the same high-speed, low-latency internet service in the air that they enjoy on the ground. This gate-to-gate connectivity will enable experiences in the sky at scale that no other major U.S. airline provides, on seatback screens and personal devices simultaneously."
While it inked the biggest deal in the industry so far, United isn't America's airborne-Starlink pioneer: A smaller US player first deployed it way back in March 2023. JSX, which offers point-to-point, "hop-on" service using 30-seat jets -- with passengers boarding at dedicated hangars rather than slogging through an airport -- serves 26 cities in the United States and Mexico.
If The Points Guy's review of the Starlink service on JSX is any indication, the near-future United WiFi experience might be pretty awesome. Reviewer Zach Griff, who streamed content on five devices simultaneously and also tested Zoom, FaceTime, and an HBO show download, said the experience could be summed up with two words: "Holy cow." It started with extreme ease of joining the network, an instantaneous process absent of landing pages or acceptance of terms and conditions. Speeds blew him away:
Each device measured download speeds in excess of 100 Mbps. Upload speeds, which hovered between five and 20 Mbps, were just as impressive. But the real show-stopper was the ping, a measure that generally indicates how much buffering you'll experience during data-intensive tasks. The ping clocked in between 28 and 150 milliseconds in the four tests — an incredible feat for inflight Wi-Fi.
In September, Hawaiian Airlines announced that free Starlink was available across all of its Airbus fleet, with no loyalty membership requirement. AirBaltic, Air France, Air New Zealand, Qatar Airways and Japan's Zipair are also rolling out the service, Business Insider reports. As of now, it looks like Starlink promises to be a significant differentiator for United for some time, as there's no word of carriers like American, Delta and Southwest joining the party. Yet.