If I weren't buckled into a seat, I might not have noticed that I was using in-flight Wi-Fi. When it came to working on my laptop and streaming movies on my phone and tablet, I could have been on my broadband at home.
But instead I was 30,000 feet up connected to Starlink Wi-Fi, on a United Airlines flight between Chicago and Minneapolis and thinking back to all the times I'd fought with expensive, slow, annoying internet access on planes. The ginger ale offered by a friendly attendant was a nice addition, too.
This experience was a demonstration flight on United's first mainline Boeing 737-800 aircraft to be outfitted with the new satellite hardware. United now offers Starlink Wi-Fi service on 25% of its fleet, which includes 300 regional aircraft and dozens of mainline planes during 2025. It's aiming to install the low-profile technology on up to 500 aircraft by the end of 2026.
At a time when our phones and smartwatches have satellite connectivity options -- helping us reach emergency responders or send text messages when we're out of range of a cell signal -- Starlink and United are providing travelers with an upgraded convenience. What's more, we're getting in-flight Wi-Fi with speeds and connectivity that rival what we experience at home or the office.
Air travel presents a conundrum: If you need Wi-Fi in the air and it's not working, you're cooked. There's no stepping out to a coffee shop hotspot or rebooting your home router. In-flight Wi-Fi has improved over the years, but it still feels risky whether it will work well or at all. And you don't discover that until you're already in the air.
The plane I traveled on isn't the first United aircraft carrying Starlink's satellite Wi-Fi equipment. United began outfitting many of its regional Embraer E175 jets in March after signing a deal with Starlink's parent company, SpaceX, last year. Although it's the inaugural United mainline aircraft, Hawaiian Airlines got the jump late last year when it outfitted its Airbus planes with the technology.
The Boeing 737-800 I flew on went into active service the next day, starting with a leg from Houston to Fort Lauderdale. Over the coming months, United expects to outfit approximately 15 mainline Boeing 737-800 planes per month with Starlink antennas.
United is offering Starlink Wi-Fi access free to United MileagePlus members. The Standard Wi-Fi option costs $8 or 1,600 miles for MileagePlus members, or $10 for everybody else. Subscriptions for frequent travelers start at $49 a month (or 7,500 miles).
In-flight Wi-Fi is all about the experience
Believe me, I want to talk about speeds and bandwidth and what a Starlink connection could mean for getting work done or being entertained in the air. But it all starts with getting connected, and too often, that experience sucks.
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