Starlink is Coming To Hawaiian Airlines (theverge.com) 23
SpaceX is starting to make deals with airlines to provide its Starlink satellite internet to sky travelers everywhere. From a report: It announced a deal on Monday with Hawaiian Airlines, and last week made a similar deal with charter carrier JSX. None of the involved parties shared the financial details of their deals, but both airlines did say they're planning to offer the in-flight Wi-Fi for free, which is both a semi-miraculous fact and a sign of hope that free Wi-Fi is becoming the industry standard. Delta meanwhile, confirmed last week that it's running "exploratory" Starlink tests. In-flight Wi-Fi has been on the minds of Team Starlink for a while. Jonathan Hofeller, SpaceX's VP of Starlink and commercial sales, said last year that the company was building an aviation product, and was "in talks with several of the airlines."
Good use case (Score:2)
Seems like a good use case for it - a single access point that can be distributed to many users in a small area. From what I've heard, they can't really have a lot of customers densely packed like in a city with their own dishes.
I guess they'll have enough satellites with the sat-to-sat communication working to cover the Pacific for this to work
planes move also wifi AP overload is an issue (Score:2)
planes move also wifi AP overload is an issue
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Wifi AP overload is more of an in-plane networking challenge. Sounds like they'll be able to handle the plane moving with the phrased-array antenna
I want Starlink for my Yacht (Score:2)
Might finally be affordable internet blue water. But I think that is still a way off. Starlink is always satelite to ground, not satelite to satelite, so does not cover the far ocean. I wander where Hawaii airlines is flying too?
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You need to brush up on the Starlink network. It's both send and receive, otherwise it wouldn't be of any use in remote areas like Moosejaw, Montana or most places in Ukraine.
Most of this was covered in the article 5 days ago when Delta announced the same deal. https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
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Sure, it is bidirectional. But the data goes up to the satellite, and then down to a ground station within about 500 miles. Not hopping from one satellite to the next.
I think they want to change that, but it is difficult. So out in the pacific no coverage, yet.
Another issue for yachts is that they wobble about.
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Not hopping from one satellite to the next.
That's only true for the version 1.0 of the satellites. The more recent versions have laser links to hop between satellites.
Awesome (Score:3)
Broadband on flights would be next-level. I would be happy with just being able to VPN properly even if there wasn't enough bandwidth for high-quality video streaming. If they could even do 1 or 2 Mbps per passenger that would be good enough to make a huge difference.
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If they can have four Starlink Premium links (at 250 Mbps, 1 Gbps total ) .. that would be enough to provide each passenger in a 737 with over 5 Mbps. Actually much more, given that most people won't even be streaming video.
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Broadband on flights would be next-level.
What do you think WiFi is?
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The FCC defines broadband as 25 Mbps or more.
A single StarLink connection can't provide that to an entire planeload of people.
Re: Awesome (Score:2)
Have you used plane WiFi?
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Yes. It sucks. But that's not the fault of the WiFi link. It's due to the ground (cellular) or satellite link (Hughes and now Starlink)
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No airplane has yet had Starlink though. Starlink will provide a lot more bandwidth than cellular.
Block VoIP/Zoom/Jabber/etc? (Score:3)
Lest air travel become even more insufferable with people yelling into their bluetooth headsets...
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Thankfully much like smoking I think society has come to to regard the "no phone calls on an airplane" a sacrosanct rule. Even if the airline didn't have a rule for it it has become the expectation.
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Society used to regard "no phone calls while you're in the bathroom" a sacrosanct rule, but that concept went down the crapper pretty quickly.
Although when I walk into the mens room and hear someone conversing from a stall, I do take a perverse pleasure in flushing as many toilets as I can.
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went down the crapper
I appreciate this.
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So is Viasat dead? (Score:2)