DOHA, Qatar–Wi-Fi on worldwide flights has normally been a solo or duo efficiency, however a forged of 1000’s delivered it on a latest Qatar-bound journey from Washington, DC.
Having Starlink’s huge constellation of low-Earth-orbit satellites present connectivity on a Qatar Airways flight as an alternative of the standard one or two satellites in far-off geostationary Earth orbit allowed for an unlimited improve in velocity and latency without charge to me in seat 35A.
It additionally subjected SpaceX’s bandwidth to a a lot harder check than my earlier expertise—a 2023 press flight on the boutique service JSX. The place that hour-long hop had solely 17 passengers sharing space-based broadband, Saturday’s 12-hour flight appeared to have each one of many 354 seats on this Boeing 777-300ER occupied.
Strike Up the Bandwidth
Starlink shrugged off that load, constantly delivering speeds quick and dependable sufficient to carry up towards most airport and lodge Wi-Fi—if lower than the 350Mbps Qatar Airways touted when it announced its Starlink partnership in October 2023.
Eleven runs of Speedtest app from Ookla (owned by PCMag’s guardian agency Ziff Davis) yielded a mean obtain velocity of 108.14Mbps, with uploads averaging 29.57Mbps.
Speedtest outcomes on a Pixel 9 Professional (Credit score: Rob Pegoraro)
Even at its slowest—a 27.7Mbps obtain measured after breakfast when virtually everybody on the airplane ought to have been on-line, and a 6.15Mbps add in the midst of the night time—Starlink’s speeds comfortably exceeded most in-flight Wi-Fi companies that I’ve tried.
Ping instances averaged 74ms, a tenth of what I see for “GEO” satellites 22,000 miles away (in comparison with the roughly 350-mile altitude of Starlink satellites). The Android model of Speedtest additionally reported packet-loss figures that averaged 1.27% over seven readings.
I observed solely two dropouts of service—one not lengthy sufficient to interrupt Spotify streaming and one other so temporary sufficient that I solely realized it had occurred when my Pixel 9 Pro warned me that its US-only satellite emergency-messaging feature wasn’t out there.
From apps that I used as I’d on the bottom—which means, no speed-testing utilities—there was no sensible approach to inform that my bandwidth got here from tiny satellites zipping overhead at some 17,000 miles an hour as an alternative of a wireless router plugged into wired broadband.
An episode of The Diplomat on Netflix streamed over the online with out interruption; for as soon as, I didn’t need to gripe about that service removing video downloads from its Windows app. YouTube clips additionally performed easily. Pictures I took uploaded to Flickr too quick for me to attempt to time their progress.
And after I used Facebook Messenger to deal with a buddy to a livestream of our touchdown at Hamad Worldwide Airport right here, the one difficulty was that app’s comically inept autofocus blurring the video each few seconds.
Some Small Glitches
In the beginning of my journey to talk at Web Summit Qatar, Qatar Airways departed from the Starlink template of gate-to-gate service—a facet the airline had touted in its October announcement of Starlink’s debut—by not turning on Starlink till near 10 minutes after our takeoff from Washington Dulles Worldwide Airport.
Then an “OryxComms” community—the identical title Qatar makes use of for its regular, paid Wi-Fi—confirmed up on my cellphone, requiring neither a password nor a click-through display. The identical single-click connection labored on my laptop computer, a 2022 HP Spectre x360.
A second, odder departure from broadband as regular got here late within the flight, after I thought I’d obtain a photograph for instance a narrative and located that the Getty Photographs web site wouldn’t load in any respect on my PC. After which I received the identical sort of could-not-reach-the-site error on my cellphone.
Activating the Private Internet Access VPN app on my cellphone let me connect with Getty Photographs, however then I couldn’t attain the PIA web site on my laptop computer to obtain that Home windows app. That is after I realized I’d downloaded the app’s installer months in the past. Putting in it let me connect with each Getty and PIA’s websites.
On reflection, I ought to have tried changing DNS settings first. However even should you see no different want for a VPN service, you could need to maintain a free VPN app useful for connection troubleshooting.
(Earlier than anyone means that SpaceX’s politically divisive CEO Elon Musk may need ordered some interference, observe that one of his least favorite news sites, NPR, labored simply nice. SpaceX itself didn’t reply an e mail despatched to its PR workplace asking what may need occurred.)
Different Airways Nearing Starlink Takeoff
Qatar Airways is off to a quick begin with its Starlink deployment, announcing Tuesday that by dashing up its set up instances, it had been in a position to put Starlink on 30 of its 57 777s and can full that rollout within the second quarter.
“We labored intently with the Starlink group to scale back this time from three days to 9 and a half hours,” Badr Mohammed Al-Meer, group CEO on the Doha-based airline, stated in a panel at Net Summit Qatar. “By the tip of this yr, inshallah, Starlink might be put in on all our widebodies.”
Not all are in service but, however a list maintained by members of the frequent-traveler forum FlyerTalk reveals Starlink confirmed lively on 18 of these twin-engine jets, listed by the final three letters of their registration codes and with hyperlinks to FlightRadar24 pages monitoring these planes.
See the tiny bumps on the highest of the fuselage behind the wing? Starlink antennas lurk underneath them. (Credit score: Qatar Airways)
Qatar doesn’t get away Starlink availability by itself flight-status pages, however should you see a 777 with two flat rectangles barely protruding from the highest of the fuselage aft of the wing as an alternative of a bigger dome ahead of the wing, you’re a Starlink-equipped airplane.
Probably the most vital of them for US vacationers might be United Airways, which announced in September that it might put Starlink on its complete fleet of 1,000-plus planes. In January, it stated it might speed up this work and have the primary Starlink-equipped business flight this spring.
Hawaiian Airlines started placing Starlink on its planes final yr and in September announced that it had accomplished that set up on all of its Airbus narrowbody and widebody plane, to be adopted by upgrades to its Boeing 787 widebodies.
Exterior the US, Air France and SAS plan their very own fleet-wide Starlink upgrades, giving passengers extra choices without spending a dime Wi-Fi on long-haul flights.
In the meantime, SpaceX is continuous its personal Starlink buildout. Lower than half an hour after I started my journey from Dulles to Doha, 22 more Starlinks had a a lot quicker and shorter experience from Vandenberg House Pressure Base in California to Earth orbit atop a Falcon 9 rocket. With a subsequent Starlink launch on Thursday, that brings the full in orbit to 7,082, per the count kept by astronomer Jonathan McDowell.
Disclosure: I moderated three panels at Net Summit Qatar, with the organizers masking my airfare and lodging.
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About Rob Pegoraro
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