Starlink Flight Test: What It's Like Using SpaceX's Broadband for Inflight Wi-Fi

pcmag.com:

DALLAS—A flight to nowhere provided a sign that inflight Wi-Fi is going somewhere after years of being a complaint generator.

And in the case of JSX’s free Starlink Wi-Fi—the first such offering by a US air carrier—it’s going somewhere fast. That Dallas-based company picked SpaceX’s satellite service as its inflight broadband provider last April, began offering it on some flights in December, and invited journalists here Tuesday for a test flight.

Unlike many current Wi-Fi systems, it started on the ground without a network password or sign-in screen to surmount. A 67-minute hop from Dallas Love Field and back then revealed a serious advance on connectivity that delivered speeds competitive with 4G and sometimes even 5G.

As measured in 15 runs of Ookla's Speedtest app during the flight across three devices—a Google Pixel 7, an Apple iPad mini 6, and a Lenovo ThinkPad X13s—Starlink downloads averaged 126Mbps, with uploads at 7.6Mbps.

Ping times averaged 54 milliseconds, less than a tenth of the response metrics I usually see up in the air on Wi-Fi delivered via satellites some 22,000 miles away in geostationary orbit.  

The open-source Measurement Lab tool(Opens in a new window), run in Chrome on the ThinkPad, yielded slightly slower results for JSX’s Starlink over three tests: 78.7Mbps down, 3.5Mbps up, and 23ms ping.

To put those numbers in context, on my United Airlines flight back to Washington, D.C. from Dallas, the Speedtest app on my Pixel 5a clocked average downloads of 5.78Mbps, with uploads inching along at 0.91Mbps and ping times a leisurely 742ms for that geostationary connectivity.

Starlink’s constellation of 3,000-plus satellites operates just 350 miles up, with the service automatically passing a connection