[bklyn11201]

Doubling bandwidth available to an airplane is awesome of course, but it seems like people are expecting a giant step here and not a simple doubling. It will be most noticeable in decreased latency so much better for phone calls and Zoom meetings. But the use case of 1/3 of passengers streaming video to their personal terminal seems already solved with existing satellite providers.

"Starlink delivers up to 40-220 Mbps download speed to each plane, enabling all passengers to access streaming-capable internet at the same time. With latency less than 99 ms, passengers can engage in activities previously not functional in flight, including video calls, online gaming, virtual private networks and other high data rate activities."

From https://www.starlink.com/support/article/da6ca363-da23-c9dc-...

"SpaceX has revealed the official details of its Starlink satellite internet service for aviation, and it promises to deliver speeds of up to 350 Mbps for each airplane.... If Starlink Aviation can truly deliver on SpaceX's promises, that would make it a lot faster than other satellite options that only offer speeds of up to 100 Mbps per plane at most."

https://www.engadget.com/spacex-starlink-aviation-350-mbps-i...

[fnordpiglet]

A doubling is, in base 2, an order of magnitude. I look at 5-10% improvements as marginal and doublings as significant especially when considering you’re dealing with something as complex as a beam formed point to point communication between two fast moving objects.

What bothers me more is the discussion of people doing video calls and phone calls on a flight. My neighbor on a recent flight from nyc to seattle jumped into a zoom call from the middle seat of a 100% full flight. It was obnoxious and distracting, and a harbinger for the total collapse of the last vestiges of any form of relaxation and decorum in the sky.

[rlt]

Speaking as someone who has used Starlink on a Hawaiian Airlines flight, I can confidently say it’s orders of magnitude better than any in-flight WiFi I’ve used before. I ran a bunch of speed tests on a flight to Hawaii and it never dropped below 100 Mbps, averaging more like 200 Mbps.

You don’t need to trust me, just search Twitter for “Starlink Hawaiian” for lots of people with similar experiences.

https://x.com/ilyasu/status/1819781267912892714

https://x.com/alexmaxham/status/1848181680273523034

https://x.com/willarshoko/status/1849010254756892807

https://x.com/kevinrose/status/1848546935289823304

[grecy]

> already solved with existing satellite providers.

From your comment I assume you have never looked into the pricing for other satellite internet with decent speeds and decent data caps.

When I drove around Africa for 3 years, the cost of even 1GB/month was going to be more than the entire expedition..

(Note: I'm talking about "satellite internet" that isn't Starlink)

Maybe the speed isn't an astronomical leap forward, but the price certainly is.

[mmmlinux]

Surely these cheaper sat data rates will trickle down to cheaper tickets or cheaper inflight internet prices then...

[grecy]

Or now you'll get sat data wifi on flights where you previously didn't have anything.