Our Last Wi-Fi-Less Refuge Is Gone
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Until very recently, airplanes were one of the last places where you couldn’t count on having good Wi-Fi.
Even the Amazon’s most remote villages have high-speed internet, but for years, the typical in-flight connectivity experience could have been best summed up by the aviation Reddit thread titled “WiFi horrible?” Now major airlines have started rolling out Wi-Fi that is both free and usable.
In June, United announced that by the end of this year, nearly 1,000 of its planes would be getting high-speed Wi-Fi via Starlink, the network of low-Earth-orbit satellites owned by SpaceX.
Other major airlines, including Delta, JetBlue, and Alaska, are partnering with either Starlink or its closest competitor, Amazon Leo, to offer better Wi-Fi in the next year or two.
This new technology provides almost the same internet experience you’d get on the ground, Seth Miller, an airline-industry analyst, told me.
This is not Wi-Fi that’s “good for an airplane.” It’s just … good.
As technology conquers this final Wi-Fi frontier, air travel will never be the same.
The fickleness that made inflight Wi-Fi infuriating was also its own kind of luxury: Planes were a bastion of unreachability.
And once that luxury is gone, we may miss it.
Delivering the internet to a metal tube traveling at 500 miles per hour, 30,000 feet above the Earth, is so difficult because the tube is both far from internet sources and constantly moving.
In the early days of plane Wi-Fi, aircraft had what were essentially giant mobile hot spots attached to their bellies, which would connect to cell towers on the ground. (This was Gogo’s in-flight Wi-Fi which, let’s be honest, never really Gogo’d.) For the past decade or so, major airlines have connected instead to satellites about 22,000 miles above the Earth, which provided Wi-Fi good enough to send an email (sometimes) but too slow for Instagram.
The satellites that Starlink and Amazon Leo use travel much closer to the Earth and the plane, so they’re about 10 times less laggy, Miller said.
5News aggregated this summary from the outlet’s public feed. The full article, with all the context, is on www.theatlantic.com — the content belongs to The Atlantic.
