Why United chose SpaceX's Starlink to power its free Wi-Fi
Late last week, United Airlines announced that it signed an agreement with Elon Musk's SpaceX to bring its Starlink internet service to its entire fleet
Late last week, United Airlines announced that it signed an agreement with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to bring its Starlink internet service to its entire fleet and — for the first time — offer free Wi-Fi to all passengers. To dig a bit deeper into why United went with Starlink, what that rollout will look like, and what it means for passengers and crew, we talked to United’s Chief Customer Officer Linda Jojo.
“If I could have done this change earlier, I certainly would have, because we’re proud of a lot of things, but we do think that our customers deserve a better Wi-Fi experience than the one they have today,” Jojo told me when I asked why the company is changing providers now.
Currently, United is using a mix of four different providers — Gogo, Thales, Panasonic and Viasat — all with different capabilities and limitations. You may find yourself on one flight that lets you stream video, for example, while your connecting flight only supports basic web surfing. While the airline has attempted to unify these systems behind a single sign-in experience, Jojo admitted that it’s not always possible to shield customers from the underlying complexity.
Meanwhile, the expectation, in part set by United’s competitors like Delta Air Lines, is that Wi-Fi on flights should be free. Yet United’s current set of providers simply didn’t have the capacity that would’ve allowed for offering free Wi-Fi to everyone on the plane, Jojo said.
“If we went free with what we had, we were going to enable a worse experience than what we had with the paid option, because the paid was just enough friction — $8 for a [MileagePlus] member — to say ‘I’m going to be really intentional about connecting,” she said. “We know the architecture and the setup today is not going to be good enough.”
The search for a better solution led United to consider low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites. They are, by definition, closer to the aircraft than those in a geosynchronous orbit, and hence can offer lower latencies, more capacity, and higher speeds. And when it comes to offering satellite-based internet access with global coverage and enough bandwidth, Starlink is pretty much the only game in town.
“If we were going to try it, we were going to try it with Starlink,” Jojo said. “We first started looking at it for our regional fleet to see if we were going to try it out. And we quickly said, ‘there’s nothing to try out here. We can see that it’s going to work.’ We could see what JSX and others were doing. We could tell from where the satellites were, that the coverage was there.”
Earlier this year, United started its negotiations with Starlink to bring its hardware onto its planes. Jojo noted that since other airlines like Hawaiian (which is now merging with Alaska Airlines) are going through a similar process right now, that should speed up the certification process as well.
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