DOHA, Qatar–Wi-Fi on international flights has usually been a solo or duo performance, but a cast of thousands delivered it on a recent Qatar-bound trip from Washington, DC.
Having Starlink’s vast constellation of low-Earth-orbit satellites provide connectivity on a Qatar Airways flight instead of the usual one or two satellites in far-off geostationary Earth orbit allowed for an enormous upgrade in speed and latency at no cost to me in seat 35A.
It also subjected SpaceX’s bandwidth to a much tougher test than my previous experience—a 2023 press flight on the boutique carrier JSX. Where that hour-long hop had only 17 passengers sharing space-based broadband, Saturday’s 12-hour flight appeared to have every one of the 354 seats on this Boeing 777-300ER occupied.
Strike Up the Bandwidth
Starlink shrugged off that load, consistently delivering speeds fast and reliable enough to hold up against most airport and hotel Wi-Fi—if less 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 parent firm Ziff Davis) yielded an average download speed of 108.14Mbps, with uploads averaging 29.57Mbps.
Speedtest results on a Pixel 9 Pro (Credit: Rob Pegoraro)
Even at its slowest—a 27.7Mbps download measured after breakfast when almost everyone on the plane should have been online, and a 6.15Mbps upload in the middle of the night—Starlink’s speeds comfortably exceeded most in-flight Wi-Fi services that I’ve tried.
Ping times averaged 74ms, a tenth of what I see for “GEO” satellites 22,000 miles away (compared to the roughly 350-mile altitude of Starlink satellites). The Android version of Speedtest also reported packet-loss figures that averaged 1.27% over seven readings.
I noticed only two dropouts of service—one not long enough to interrupt Spotify streaming and another so brief enough that I only realized it had happened when my Pixel 9 Pro warned me that its US-only satellite emergency-messaging feature wasn’t available.
From looking at apps that I used as I would on the ground—meaning, no speed-testing utilities—there was no practical way to tell that my bandwidth came from tiny satellites zipping overhead at some 17,000 miles an hour instead of a wireless router plugged into wired broadband.
An episode of The Diplomat on Netflix streamed over the web without interruption; for once, I didn’t have to gripe about that service removing video downloads from its Windows app. YouTube clips also played smoothly. Photos I took uploaded to Flickr too fast for me to try to time their progress.
And when I used Facebook Messenger to treat a friend to a livestream of our landing at Hamad International Airport here, the only issue was that app’s comically inept autofocus blurring the video every few seconds.
Some Small Glitches
At the start of my trip to speak at Web Summit Qatar, Qatar Airways departed from the Starlink template of gate-to-gate service—an aspect the airline had touted in its October announcement of Starlink’s debut—by not turning on Starlink until close to 10 minutes after our takeoff from Washington Dulles International Airport.
Then an “OryxComms” network—the same name Qatar uses for its regular, paid Wi-Fi—showed up on my phone, requiring neither a password nor a click-through screen. The same single-click connection worked on my laptop, a 2022 HP Spectre x360.
A second, odder departure from broadband as usual came late in the flight, when I thought I’d download a photo to illustrate a story and found that the Getty Images site would not load at all on my PC. And then I got the same type of could-not-reach-the-site error on my phone.
Activating the Private Internet Access VPN app on my phone let me connect to Getty Images, but then I couldn’t reach the PIA site on my laptop to download that Windows app. That’s when I realized I’d downloaded the app’s installer months ago. Installing it let me connect to both Getty and PIA’s sites.
In retrospect, I should have tried changing DNS settings first. But even if you see no other need for a VPN service, you may want to keep a free VPN app handy for connection troubleshooting.
(Before anybody suggests that SpaceX’s politically divisive CEO Elon Musk might have ordered some interference, note that one of his least favorite news sites, NPR, worked just fine. SpaceX itself did not answer an email sent to its PR office asking what might have happened.)
Other Airlines Nearing Starlink Takeoff
Qatar Airways is off to a fast start with its Starlink deployment, announcing Tuesday that by speeding up its installation times, it had been able to put Starlink on 30 of its 57 777s and will complete that rollout in the second quarter.
“We worked closely with the Starlink team to reduce this time from three days to nine and a half hours,” Badr Mohammed Al-Meer, group CEO at the Doha-based airline, said in a panel at Web Summit Qatar. “By the end of this year, inshallah, Starlink will be installed on all our widebodies.”
Not all are in service yet, but a list maintained by members of the frequent-traveler forum FlyerTalk shows Starlink confirmed active on 18 of those twin-engine jets, listed by the last three letters of their registration codes and with links to FlightRadar24 pages tracking those planes.
See the tiny bumps on the top of the fuselage behind the wing? Starlink antennas lurk under them. (Credit: Qatar Airways)
Qatar doesn’t break out Starlink availability on its own flight-status pages, but if you see a 777 with two flat rectangles barely protruding from the top of the fuselage aft of the wing instead of a larger dome forward of the wing, you’re looking at a Starlink-equipped plane.
The most significant of them for US travelers will be United Airlines, which announced in September that it would put Starlink on its entire fleet of 1,000-plus planes. In January, it said it would speed up this work and have the first Starlink-equipped commercial flight this spring.
Hawaiian Airlines began putting Starlink on its planes last year and in September announced that it had completed that installation on all of its Airbus narrowbody and widebody aircraft, to be followed by upgrades to its Boeing 787 widebodies.
Outside the US, Air France and SAS plan their own fleet-wide Starlink upgrades, giving passengers additional options for free Wi-Fi on long-haul flights.
Meanwhile, SpaceX is continuing its own Starlink buildout. Less than half an hour after I began my journey from Dulles to Doha, 22 more Starlinks had a much faster and shorter ride from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California to Earth orbit atop a Falcon 9 rocket. With a subsequent Starlink launch on Thursday, that brings the total in orbit to 7,082, per the count kept by astronomer Jonathan McDowell.
Disclosure: I moderated three panels at Web Summit Qatar, with the organizers covering my airfare and lodging.
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About Rob Pegoraro
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