presumably because to improve airplane wifi, you’d need to launch dozens of rockets to deliver a massive new constellation of orbiting satellites in order to deliver an order-of-magnitude improvement over Intelsat or whoever usually provides wifi connections to planes.
The good news is that SpaceX has done this, with their Starlink constellation! (Others like OneWeb, Baidu, and Amazon’s Project Kuiper are also doing similar stuff.) But not every airline / airplane has upgraded to new Starlink recievers yet. So, most planes (and cruise ships, and etc) still have slow Intelsat/Globalstar internet, but others have indeed seen huge upgrades in internet speeds.
why is it taking so long to upgrade planes to use starlink? it doesn’t sound like there are huge technical barriers to doing so, and it would be hugely profitable. i would not only pay a lot per flight for good wifi, i would also fly way more often
i would not only pay a lot per flight for good wifi, i would also fly way more often
I’m not sure how common this preference is.
I think that the economic gains from people traveling on business having access to better wifi on planes might be quite large[1], but airlines themselves are not well-positioned to capture very much of those gains. There are a very small number of domestic airlines which don’t offer any wifi on their planes at all. The rest generally offer it for free, or for some relatively low price (on the order of $10). Often even the airlines that charge for it offer it as a free or discounted perk for their “frequent fliers”. Those airlines might have a hard time increasing the sticker price of their wifi offering, even if the quality improves a lot, so they’d have to hope for most of the gains to come from business-class travelers switching to them from a competitor (or, as in your case, deciding to fly at all, on the margin). But it’s not obvious to me that most business-class travelers themselves want better wifi, since once it improves past a certain point they might have very little excuse for not working through the flight. (Maybe this is too cynical, or already moot, idk.)
None of this is meant to say that airlines have no incentive to improve their wifi—I’m pretty sure some of them are already getting started on the Starlink transition—merely that there are a bunch of factors that might make that incentive weaker than it might obviously seem.
Maybe a sizable fraction of “the economic value of their average working hour * flight duration”, which could be thousands of dollars per flight for some travelers.
I think anyone who has ever tried to work on a plane knows that plane wifi is bad enough to reduce your productivity hugely. so I don’t think business travellers who are already paying thousands to fly would shy away from paying hundred of dollars for actually good wifi on a long haul flight.
I’d predict most business travellers are not really using being on a plane as an excuse to not work.
Anything that goes onto airplanes is CERTIFIED TO SHIT. That’s a big part of the reason why.
Another part is that it’s clearly B2B, and anything B2B is an adversarial shark pit where each company is trying to take a bite out of each other while avoiding getting a bite taken out of them.
Between those two, it’ll take a good while for quality Wi-Fi to proliferate, even though we 100% have the tech now.
Huh. Why would B2B be more adversarially shark pitty than B2C? I’m not saying you are wrong I’m just curious (a) what the evidence is and (b) what the theory is that predicts this conclusion.
I think the installation is actually quite complicated (source: I vaguely remember how my friend who works at Starlink described the process. ChatGPT claims the installation is $150k and requires modifying the airframe).
You do have to attach a pretty sizeable antenna to the top of your plane, plus whatever accompanying wiring is necessary… maybe maintenance capacity is the bottleneck? It’s a little hard to imagine that airlines are bottlenecked by this, since it seems pretty minor compared to other kinds of maintenance planes commonly undergo (like swapping out an engine)? But quotes from this site saying that some airline “hopes to have units installed in at least 25% of their aircraft by the end of 2025”, or that another “expects to ramp that number up to 40 installations per month” suggest that maybe this is the reason why airlines like United, Hawaiian, etc (which have started but not completed their rollouts) aren’t yet at 100%.
maybe starlink has some kind of interconnection queue where they can only ramp up so many users at a time?? but I’d expect that stuff like airlines and cruise ships would be relatively high-paying customers at the front of the line, at least compared to ordinary consumers (who can currently order starlink antennas online for next-day shipping).
probably the airlines themselves are not that motivated to instantly upgrade their fleets, since most people don’t choose flights based on who has the fastest wifi? in a similar way, other in-flight amenities—legroom, seat material, the quality of meals on international flights, how good the little screen for in-flight movies is, etc, are individually not super-important to people; most important is the flight route + flight timing + ticket price.
especially when you consider the fact that Starlink has a monopoly, and is probably charging airlines a profit-maximizing price, meaning that airlines which adopt the new service might not actually see any additional revenue on net even if they can charge slightly higher ticket prices once they have fast wifi. Other airlines are perhaps thinking they should wait until more satellite-internet constellations (like the aforementioned project Kuiper) get off the ground and prices come down?
maybe some budget airlines like Frontier or RyanAir calculate that most of their passengers are cheapskates who wouldn’t pay for fast wifi (either directly or through higher ticket prices)
it does kinda seem weird, though, that this list of airlines doing / considering starlink upgrades doesn’t even contain some of the US’s biggest airlines, like Southwest, Delta, or American. I’d bet they’re maybe waiting for lower prices, but it’s always possible they’re just asleep at the wheel.
I’d personally pay more, endure less convenient timing, and sit in a less comfortable seat if it meant I had fast wifi.
like right now flying is pretty time costly for me because most of my highest value work can only be done with internet, so flying means losing a lot of high productivity hours. fast wifi would mean the only time cost of flying is the tiny bit I spend walking through the airport on either end.
Presumably you’d still feel productivity effects from not having a monitor, having worse ergonomics, etc?
I was surprised to see you say above that you’d anticipate flying way more often! Are there times you’ve wanted to fly recently but held off because you couldn’t spare the lost hours of flying? (I would have expected the bigger barrier to be the loss of productive hours from, say, being out-of-the-office in the destination itself)
I don’t really care that much about not having a monitor. it’s a minor productivity hit, whereas not having reliable vaguely-fast internet completely ruins productivity.
I would absolutely fly so much more. weekend trips become way more feasible if I can fly out on Friday and return on Monday. working remotely but visiting HQ occasionally (or otherwise splitting time between two cities) gets a lot easier, because you no longer lose a day of productivity (or a night of sleep) each time.
presumably because to improve airplane wifi, you’d need to launch dozens of rockets to deliver a massive new constellation of orbiting satellites in order to deliver an order-of-magnitude improvement over Intelsat or whoever usually provides wifi connections to planes.
The good news is that SpaceX has done this, with their Starlink constellation! (Others like OneWeb, Baidu, and Amazon’s Project Kuiper are also doing similar stuff.) But not every airline / airplane has upgraded to new Starlink recievers yet. So, most planes (and cruise ships, and etc) still have slow Intelsat/Globalstar internet, but others have indeed seen huge upgrades in internet speeds.
why is it taking so long to upgrade planes to use starlink? it doesn’t sound like there are huge technical barriers to doing so, and it would be hugely profitable. i would not only pay a lot per flight for good wifi, i would also fly way more often
I’m not sure how common this preference is.
I think that the economic gains from people traveling on business having access to better wifi on planes might be quite large[1], but airlines themselves are not well-positioned to capture very much of those gains. There are a very small number of domestic airlines which don’t offer any wifi on their planes at all. The rest generally offer it for free, or for some relatively low price (on the order of $10). Often even the airlines that charge for it offer it as a free or discounted perk for their “frequent fliers”. Those airlines might have a hard time increasing the sticker price of their wifi offering, even if the quality improves a lot, so they’d have to hope for most of the gains to come from business-class travelers switching to them from a competitor (or, as in your case, deciding to fly at all, on the margin). But it’s not obvious to me that most business-class travelers themselves want better wifi, since once it improves past a certain point they might have very little excuse for not working through the flight. (Maybe this is too cynical, or already moot, idk.)
None of this is meant to say that airlines have no incentive to improve their wifi—I’m pretty sure some of them are already getting started on the Starlink transition—merely that there are a bunch of factors that might make that incentive weaker than it might obviously seem.
Maybe a sizable fraction of “the economic value of their average working hour * flight duration”, which could be thousands of dollars per flight for some travelers.
I think anyone who has ever tried to work on a plane knows that plane wifi is bad enough to reduce your productivity hugely. so I don’t think business travellers who are already paying thousands to fly would shy away from paying hundred of dollars for actually good wifi on a long haul flight.
I’d predict most business travellers are not really using being on a plane as an excuse to not work.
Anything that goes onto airplanes is CERTIFIED TO SHIT. That’s a big part of the reason why.
Another part is that it’s clearly B2B, and anything B2B is an adversarial shark pit where each company is trying to take a bite out of each other while avoiding getting a bite taken out of them.
Between those two, it’ll take a good while for quality Wi-Fi to proliferate, even though we 100% have the tech now.
Huh. Why would B2B be more adversarially shark pitty than B2C? I’m not saying you are wrong I’m just curious (a) what the evidence is and (b) what the theory is that predicts this conclusion.
I think the installation is actually quite complicated (source: I vaguely remember how my friend who works at Starlink described the process. ChatGPT claims the installation is $150k and requires modifying the airframe).
dunno! some speculation:
You do have to attach a pretty sizeable antenna to the top of your plane, plus whatever accompanying wiring is necessary… maybe maintenance capacity is the bottleneck? It’s a little hard to imagine that airlines are bottlenecked by this, since it seems pretty minor compared to other kinds of maintenance planes commonly undergo (like swapping out an engine)? But quotes from this site saying that some airline “hopes to have units installed in at least 25% of their aircraft by the end of 2025”, or that another “expects to ramp that number up to 40 installations per month” suggest that maybe this is the reason why airlines like United, Hawaiian, etc (which have started but not completed their rollouts) aren’t yet at 100%.
maybe starlink has some kind of interconnection queue where they can only ramp up so many users at a time?? but I’d expect that stuff like airlines and cruise ships would be relatively high-paying customers at the front of the line, at least compared to ordinary consumers (who can currently order starlink antennas online for next-day shipping).
probably the airlines themselves are not that motivated to instantly upgrade their fleets, since most people don’t choose flights based on who has the fastest wifi? in a similar way, other in-flight amenities—legroom, seat material, the quality of meals on international flights, how good the little screen for in-flight movies is, etc, are individually not super-important to people; most important is the flight route + flight timing + ticket price.
especially when you consider the fact that Starlink has a monopoly, and is probably charging airlines a profit-maximizing price, meaning that airlines which adopt the new service might not actually see any additional revenue on net even if they can charge slightly higher ticket prices once they have fast wifi. Other airlines are perhaps thinking they should wait until more satellite-internet constellations (like the aforementioned project Kuiper) get off the ground and prices come down?
maybe some budget airlines like Frontier or RyanAir calculate that most of their passengers are cheapskates who wouldn’t pay for fast wifi (either directly or through higher ticket prices)
it does kinda seem weird, though, that this list of airlines doing / considering starlink upgrades doesn’t even contain some of the US’s biggest airlines, like Southwest, Delta, or American. I’d bet they’re maybe waiting for lower prices, but it’s always possible they’re just asleep at the wheel.
I’d personally pay more, endure less convenient timing, and sit in a less comfortable seat if it meant I had fast wifi.
like right now flying is pretty time costly for me because most of my highest value work can only be done with internet, so flying means losing a lot of high productivity hours. fast wifi would mean the only time cost of flying is the tiny bit I spend walking through the airport on either end.
Presumably you’d still feel productivity effects from not having a monitor, having worse ergonomics, etc?
I was surprised to see you say above that you’d anticipate flying way more often! Are there times you’ve wanted to fly recently but held off because you couldn’t spare the lost hours of flying? (I would have expected the bigger barrier to be the loss of productive hours from, say, being out-of-the-office in the destination itself)
I don’t really care that much about not having a monitor. it’s a minor productivity hit, whereas not having reliable vaguely-fast internet completely ruins productivity.
I would absolutely fly so much more. weekend trips become way more feasible if I can fly out on Friday and return on Monday. working remotely but visiting HQ occasionally (or otherwise splitting time between two cities) gets a lot easier, because you no longer lose a day of productivity (or a night of sleep) each time.