It has been quite a few years since Wi-Fi became available on planes, but the experience has usually been akin to a snail crossing Abbey Road. Not any longer — at least not on some aircraft. At 10,365m altitude, with a ground speed of 1,071km/h, it’s now business as usual: Articles to write, pages to design, emails to reply to, creatives to prepare, photos to edit, and an iffy VPN connection to the office to navigate. Starlink is changing air travel and, indirectly, the way we work.
Even until last year, accessing WhatsApp messages on a plane’s free-tier Wi-Fi felt like an out-of-body experience — at least for me, someone who still considers flying to be a privilege. Like anything in life, having Internet access on a long-distance flight comes with its upsides and downsides.
A few hours after a series of meetings with the folks at Qualcomm across their offices in San Diego, it was time to board a flight from Los Angeles to Doha. How do you spend 15 hours in the air? Earlier, the answer involved reading a book, going through work-related material downloaded before boarding, or catching a slice of in-flight entertainment. In the last year or so, it has increasingly become about work.
It's a usual day at the office but during a work trip on the plane
You may point out that it has long been possible to purchase an Internet package that allows limited bandwidth for basic tasks. But such packages come with strings attached. First, the aircraft has to reach a certain altitude. Second, this type of connectivity often doesn’t work throughout the flight. Third, speeds are… well, up in the air.
Lately, I’ve been seeing around 187Mbps download speeds, while uploads hover around 27.9Mbps. It’s crazy fast for plane Wi-Fi. Not always, of course, but substantially better than anything before. Most importantly, latency has dropped drastically.
Leaving the past behind
Airline Wi-Fi is not new. Back in 2001, Boeing introduced its Wi-Fi service, ConneXion. The experience was slow and expensive — but then, this was an era before the need to watch Netflix or YouTube while flying.
How has plane Wi-Fi worked until recently? An aircraft has two ways to send and receive signals: via ground cell towers or via satellite. The air-to-ground method has been functional, but planes are far from towers, causing signals to max out at roughly 3Mbps.
With such limited bandwidth shared among dozens or hundreds of passengers, everything slows to a crawl. Charging for access helps reduce demand — if only 10 passengers pay for Wi-Fi, speeds are tolerable simply because everyone else can’t get on.
The faster option comes from above. With satellite Internet, a ground antenna transmits signals up to a geostationary satellite thousands of kilometres above the Earth. The satellite relays the signal to the aircraft, where a large antenna on the fuselage receives it. The satellite antenna on the plane must physically move to track satellites. Geo-sats are faster than cellular systems and offer lower latency compared to ground towers — but even so, when latency is high, the Internet simply pauses.
There’s another bump in the road: since there are only a few such satellites, many planes connect to the same ones, bringing down overall speeds.
The future is now
Speed tests for the Starlink connection
Enter Starlink. Things improve drastically with low-Earth-orbit satellites. Less than 1,000 miles from Earth, the data has far less distance to travel, meaning far lower latency.
Starlink’s advantage lies in this low latency. Its satellites sit far closer to Earth than geo-sats, so signals go up and down much faster. Latency makes a huge difference to loading web pages — which consist of text, images, scripts, adverts and videos downloaded in multiple packets. Once your device receives a small packet, it must respond before the next one is sent. Reduce the latency, and everything becomes much snappier.
With geo-sat, latency sits around 250ms. With Starlink, it’s closer to 20ms. Further, Starlink has thousands of satellites operating above Earth, which spreads out demand and drastically increases the bandwidth available to each aircraft.
Traditional airline antennas are large and bulky. The hump on the fuselage creates drag, increasing fuel consumption. Starlink uses a phased-array antenna, which can direct the signal electronically — no moving parts required.
What I’ve been able to achieve on a Starlink connection is unbelievable: logging into my office computer via VPN while streaming music and browsing the Internet. Even streaming Netflix isn’t an issue. On the Qatar Airways flight (Starlink is free for all passengers on the Los Angeles–Doha route), I managed to connect two smartphones and a laptop simultaneously. Not enough? I made video calls.
This is essentially working from home — except home, in this case, is an aeroplane. There are hardly any downsides. The only real issues are the limited number of airlines with Starlink partnerships, and the possibility of heavy aircraft congestion affecting stability — though I faced none of that. And it’s not just Starlink; Intelsat is also in the game.
The bigger downside is what good-quality Internet on board means for our lives. First, air travel has traditionally been a rare pocket of time free from work. No longer. Even if airlines begin charging for Starlink, offices may reimburse employees so long as they work during flights. Second, people are now taking online calls. Some don’t use wireless earbuds, leaving you trapped listening to inane conversations. Finally, almost every second person on the Los Angeles–Doha flight was glued to Instagram Reels. More social-media addiction at 35,000ft!