- Starlink seems to be everywhere – not only serving rural areas on the ground, but planes flying overhead
- On some airlines, in-flight Wi-Fi could become as ubiquitous/affordable as hotel Wi-Fi in a matter of two to four years
- A goal for mobile network operators is to improve roaming with in-flight Wi-Fi
If you’ve flown recently – say to Mobile World Congress 2026 in Barcelona – you might have experienced super-fast in-flight Wi-Fi thanks to Starlink. Or you might have stared at the flight map on the seat in front of you and wished (or not) for a speedy Wi-Fi connection.
Either way, it’s clear that Starlink is upending the in-flight Wi-Fi business in a big way.
How much? “Enormously,” said Maravedis founder Adlane Fellah, who studies these things for a living.
Other analysts agree, saying Starlink is setting a new benchmark for the industry. Much of it is tied to Starlink’s 9,000+ low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites and ability to offer download speeds of 350 Mbps and latencies under 99 milliseconds.
“You’re now in territory comparable to a decent home broadband connection and latency is low enough to support video calls and real-time applications,” Fellah said, noting that’s something geostationary Earth orbit (GEO) satellite solutions, with their roughly 600 millisecond round-trip latency, could never reliably do.
Ookla analyst Kerry Baker published a comprehensive in-flight connectivity analysis last June, remarking that Starlink was elevating in-flight Wi-Fi performance – and that’s even more true today.
“You hear more and more announcements about airlines swapping over to Starlink,” he told Fierce. “They have that first-mover advantage, if you will. It is quite dominant at this point.”
The Wi-Fi way-back machine
It hasn’t always been this way. For years – some might say two decades – in-flight Wi-Fi was a terrible experience for a lot of people, including yours truly who remembers spending $30 for Gogo pass and getting a “no go” connection on a flight from Portland, Oregon, to New York City.
Historically, comparing in-flight Wi-Fi to terrestrial networks was downright embarrassing, Fellah said.
“Shared 3G/4G air-to-ground (ATG) solutions, capped at 10 Mbps across an entire aircraft, meant that, in practice, passengers got dial-up-era speeds. Even Gogo’s new 5G ATG solution tops out at 80 Mbps peak, shared across all passengers.”
LEO satellite solutions like Starlink are changing this substantially.
Airlines following hotels?
The big question is: When will in-flight Wi-Fi be as ubiquitous (and free) as hotel Wi-Fi?
Timelines vary by geographic region and airlines. “The analogy to hotel Wi-Fi is apt,” Fellah said. “Hotels charged for it well into the 2010s before competitive pressure and guest expectations made free Wi-Fi table stakes. Airlines are on a similar curve, just delayed by the much higher cost and complexity of the underlying infrastructure.”
The LEO satellite wave, particularly Starlink, is the inflection point that makes in-flight Wi-Fi economically plausible. “I’d estimate that on major full-service carriers in North America and Europe, free Wi-Fi will be the norm by 2028-2030. Budget and regional carriers will lag by another 3-5 years, if they get there at all, without regulatory nudges,” he said.
Mobile carriers and in-flight Wi-Fi
Although they’re not providing in-flight connectivity per se, mobile network operators (MNOs) are inserting themselves into the equation. T-Mobile has deals with Delta, Alaska Airlines, Hawaiian Airlines and Southwest, sponsoring free Wi-Fi for the airlines’ loyalty program members – where available on select aircraft. In January 2026, AT&T started sponsoring free in-flight Wi-Fi for AAdvantage members on American Airlines flights.
The in-flight Wi-Fi user experience is something the Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) is certainly paying attention to. WBA, whose membership includes AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile’s parent company Deutsche Telekom, is heavily focused on making Wi-Fi roaming as easy as cellular roaming, among other things.
A working group within WBA is currently developing in-flight connectivity guidelines for mobile network operators. The objective is to develop concise and practical guidelines to support MNOs in extending their connectivity footprint into the aviation environment, according to WBA CEO Tiago Rodrigues.
The group is focused on two main areas: Business models that enable MNOs and other players to offload traffic onto airline networks and technical deployment guidelines to ensure the best possible end-user experience.
“The role of MNOs is to enable their subscribers to use their existing SIM/eSIM credentials to access in-flight Wi-Fi services in an automatic and secure experience,” Rodrigues said. “This effectively represents a Wi-Fi roaming model, requiring commercial and technical agreements between the MNO and the airline (or its connectivity provider), allowing users to connect seamlessly without manual authentication steps.”
Starlink adds more airlines
Hawaiian Airlines was the first major U.S. airline to offer free Wi-Fi using Starlink and subsequently recorded the highest speed and latency scores of any airline tested by Ookla.
“That’s a powerful proof point,” Fellah said. “United Airlines is retrofitting roughly 40 planes a month to get its entire fleet on Starlink by year-end, which is an extraordinarily aggressive deployment pace for aviation.”
Starlink has secured major agreements with other leading airlines, including Qatar Airways, Emirates, British Airways and Virgin Atlantic, noted CCS Insight analyst Luke Pearce.
That said, the market remains competitive. Incumbent providers such as Viasat continue to secure new airline partnerships and new entrants are emerging. Amazon Leo, for example, already signed a deal with JetBlue and reportedly has been in talks with American Airlines. Chinese LEO constellations could add further competition, particularly in certain regional and domestic markets, Pearce added.
How good can in-flight Wi-Fi get?
Can in-flight Wi-Fi ever be as good a terrestrial cellular? Fellah noted that up to 250 Mbps shared across a full widebody aircraft with 200+ passengers still translates to a few Mbps per user under load, roughly comparable to a congested public Wi-Fi hotspot.
Here’s how it stacks up: “Currently better than an airport lounge on a bad day, not yet as good as a home fiber connection. As LEO constellations expand capacity and airlines invest in multi-antenna configurations like the Hughes FDX ESA setup Delta is deploying, per-user throughput will improve. But genuinely fast, reliable in-flight Wi-Fi that feels like your office connection is probably still 4-6 years away at scale,” Fellah concluded.