The free in-flight Wi-Fi on Southwest Airlines should become a whole lot faster on some of its planes, once Southwest outfits those aircraft with receivers for SpaceX’s Starlink.
The Dallas-based carrier announced this revamp Wednesday, less than four months after lowering the cost of its connectivity from $8 to $0 a flight in a partnership with T-Mobile.
Southwest says it will put its first Starlink-equipped jet into service this summer, with plans to outfit 300-plus planes with free Starlink broadband by the end of the year. That would leave about 500 to go in a fleet that Southwest reported as totaling 810 Boeing 737 aircraft last July.
Wednesday’s announcement says all of these planes will get some sort of low-Earth-orbit connectivity, but it doesn’t specify that all of them will have Starlink: “This is a major step in the carrier’s plan to upgrade all its aircraft with high-speed, low-Earth-orbit satellite technology.”
One obvious alternative would be Amazon’s in-development Leo satellite constellation, which JetBlue has already picked to replace in-flight broadband currently delivered by satellites in geostationary orbit.
Starlink offers faster downloads, much faster uploads and vastly lower latency compared with “GEO” services, both because of its lower altitude—about 350 miles up instead of 22,000 and change—and because SpaceX’s growing constellation of Starlink satellites, with more than 9,600 now in operation, delivers so much combined bandwidth.
But Southwest could also opt for an upcoming service from the Canadian firm Telesat. Qviation journalist and analyst Seth Miller noted in his writeup of the airline’s news that Viasat, the current operator of much of Southwest’s connectivity, already plans to resell Telesat’s Lightspeed service.
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Southwest PR did not respond to a request for comment about any other satellite providers it might consider, or if Starlink would bring a change to its current Wi-Fi sponsorship deal with T-Mobile. That wireless carrier is already SpaceX’s leading partner in offering satellite roaming to smartphone users.
However this Starlink rollout goes, it will mark a major advance for SpaceX in providing in-flight broadband: Southwest ranks as the fourth largest airline in the US by multiple metrics. Adding its planes to the Starlink-equipped aircraft already in service or soon to be upgraded at United Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines, plus the Alaska Airlines jets to be upgraded with Starlink, will mean a large fraction of the US flying population will be able to use SpaceX’s broadband in the air.
But while adding Starlink will help Southwest solve the technology problem of slow in-flight Wi-Fi, it won’t solve another: a lack of in-seat power beyond USB ports that may leave some passengers on its longest flights forced offline because of a low laptop battery.
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Rob Pegoraro writes about interesting problems and possibilities in computers, gadgets, apps, services, telecom, and other things that beep or blink. He’s covered such developments as the evolution of the cell phone from 1G to 5G, the fall and rise of Apple, Google’s growth from obscure Yahoo rival to verb status, and the transformation of social media from CompuServe forums to Facebook’s billions of users. Pegoraro has met most of the founders of the internet and once received a single-word email reply from Steve Jobs.
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