Name: Airplane Wi-Fi Stinks. I Tested New Tech That Could Finally Fix It.
Uploaded: 2024-09-04T09:29:00Z
Duration: 8 min 42 s
Description: Buffering, error messages, dropped connections. In-flight Wi-Fi can be hit or miss, but that’s about to change. WSJ’s Joanna Stern tested Starlink and Intelsat’s low-earth orbit satellite tech.

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Buffering, error messages, dropped connections. In-flight Wi-Fi can be hit or miss, but that’s about to change. WSJ’s Joanna Stern tested Starlink and Intelsat’s low-earth orbit satellite tech. Photo Illustration: Ryan Trefes

https://m.wsj.net/video/20240905/7550fe4b-7424-4dd8-afc4-89ecc34f8708/2/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

Buffering, error messages, dropped connections. In-flight Wi-Fi can be hit or miss, but that’s about to change. WSJ’s Joanna Stern tested Starlink and Intelsat’s low-earth orbit satellite tech.

Airplane Wi-Fi Stinks. I Tested New Tech That Could Finally Fix It.

Joanna: It's pretty nuts. A plane can speed through the air at 500 miles per hour, and yet the Wi-Fi onboard is usually slow.

Good afternoon, folks, from the flight deck. This is the captain speaking.

Joanna: But not on this plane and lots of planes you might fly soon.

Like to welcome you to 35,000 feet. Enjoy the flight and the super fast Wi-Fi.

This special plane is equipped with a new low-earth orbit satellite antenna, which means... Yeah, this is actually crazy fast for plane Wi-Fi. Hi guys. It's me from an airplane. All 10 devices are streaming YouTube. I've long had one big question. Why is it that the Wi-Fi is decent on some planes, but absolutely terrible on others? So for the past three months, I've enlisted my summer traveling colleagues to run various tests at 30,000 feet. I gathered data from over 50 different flights across eight different airlines to uncover what's happening in the clouds. I also tested brand new tech from Intelsat and SpaceX's Starlink. Look at these speeds in the laboratory. They fix a lot of the issues and take in-flight Wi-Fi to new heights. Let's do this. The main reason in-flight Wi-Fi can be so hit or miss, really old tech. And if any company can make sense of that old tech, it's Intelsat, which has provided wireless networking to airlines for more than a decade. So I go on two flights from the same airline. First one, connection's good. Second one, I wanna cry.

That's because not all the airplanes are the same. The airline makes a decision what equipment to put on that airplane at the time they acquire it or the time they reconfigure it. They might also decide not to upgrade it at some point during its life, at which point it just stays with the older technology it had.

Joanna: Believe it or not, some planes are still connecting to old 3G cellular towers on the ground.

This is our original air to ground system.

Joanna: Planes equipped with antennas like that connect to ground 3G cellular networks. Then they broadcast that connection via Wi-Fi through the cabin. The main provider was a company called Gogo, and it was slow, about three megabits per second, just enough for email and messaging and not much else. Intelsat bought the commercial aviation division of Gogo in 2020.

When you fly around on an airplane today and you have an inconsistent experience from one flight to the next, one airplane might still have this old technology, which we installed back in 2012 let's say. That's 12 years ago and it's performing like it's 12 years old.

Joanna: On a cellular equipped Delta flight from New York to Cleveland, a colleague paid $10 for remarkably poor and giant thumbs down Wi-Fi. Delta says it plans to upgrade planes soon. Yeah, air to ground cellular sucked. So the aviation Wi-Fi tech providers began offering geostationary or GEO satellite connectivity from over 20,000 miles out in space. This is the most common connection now.

This is a satellite antenna that moves around and it's tracking satellites. And the reason it moves like this is because as the aircraft itself moves through space, it needs to continue repointing itself to face the satellites which are in geostationary orbit. That means they're parked down at the equator.

Joanna: Geo is faster than old cellular systems, making streaming video and audio possible. But the latency, how quickly data travels is slower because those satellites are so far out in space and not all geo connections are equal. Nearly 70% reported being able to stream music. But with video, only 40% said they could stream Netflix or another service. For the most part, email and web browsing worked. But realtime apps that needed snappier latency like Google Docs, were spotty.

And the internet, when it faces high latency, it just pauses unnaturally, and we don't want it to do that.

And of course there were the fun times where nothing worked at all. The Wi-Fi tech providers say they monitor systems in real time, so they know when they need to send maintenance out for a fix. And you can see how many people are online.

We can see how many people are online. Here's a flight from Heathrow to San Diego, 32 people using the internet on this one.

So no, things aren't perfect, but they're getting better thanks to low Earth orbit or LEO satellites.

Joanna: Less than a thousand miles from earth, the data travels a shorter distance, thus it delivers that lower latency or snappier performance. So I packed my bags and boarded a plane to test--

This aircraft is equipped to a Starlink high speed Wi-Fi.

Yes, Starlink from Elon Musk's SpaceX is powered by low earth orbit satellites. And JSX, a smaller air carrier has already equipped its planes with Starlink antennas and routers. So I connected 10 different devices to the network and flew JSX round trip from Dallas to Houston. Sure, the speeds hit over 150 megabits per second, and latency was impressive. Wow. Wow, wow, wow. But it was more what I could do on the network. Netflix streaming perfectly. And since the plane wasn't full, 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 10. 10 devices streaming. Ad yes, I could also... Anybody there? Hi guys. There was little to no delay, though there were some complaints about my audio.

You sound like a robot that's being drowned.

There were less complaints when I tried to call someone on the same network. Serious testing in progress. Hello? His video appears to be working and his audio. It was like working from home. But home is an airplane seat. Next goal. Got you. Google Docs, Slack, web browsing, Spotify, it all kept up the whole time. No dropped connections. But there are two downsides to Starlink. First, it's not widely available right now. You have to fly Hawaiian Air or JSX to get it. Then, LEO connections aren't ideal in areas of heavy airplane congestion like here. So--

Intelsat Employee: Okay.

Joanna: Wow.

This is our brand new, state of the art ISSA antenna. It's key characteristic that's so important is that it can interact with geostationary satellites and it can deal with LEO satellites. Wherever congestion may emerge in a LEO network, the antenna will automatically switch to GEO so that it can continue to offer the best in-flight internet possible.

Joanna: So there I went again. I boarded Intelsat's test plane and flew from Chicago to Newark testing both LEO and GEO connections. All right, 10 devices all connected. The GEO connection was better than any commercial airline I'd been on because I had the entire plane to myself, but I could still experience the constraints. Hi. Do you think there's a delay?

I think there's a delay.

When they switched the connection to LEO, it was very similar to Starlink. I immediately felt the improvement in latency, even when I had my 10-device YouTube test going. Okay, I could join the meeting.

And the delay doesn't seem that bad on this one compared to this previous.

Even everyone's worst nightmare worked well. The smell in here is not bad. How's the delay?

It's like totally normal.

You could see it in the speed tests too. The speeds on LEO and GEO were similar, but look at that latency or ping score. It's much lower on LEO. Intelsat plans to roll out the new LEO geotech with airlines at the end of this year, starting with those old cellular Gogo planes. ViaSat and Panasonic are planning to release multi-orbit GEO and LEO technology too. So what did I learn from all this testing and all these flights? Satellites matter. Some other things I learned. Where you sit on the plane shouldn't impact Wi-Fi performance. More and more airlines are offering free Wi-Fi, and the airlines also decide what services to block. For instance, United blocks Netflix on some planes, but not on others. And finally, one thing matters in a big way. Does it matter how many people are connected?

That's a huge factor. So that's where throttling might come into the picture to limit how much streaming people can do onboard the airplane. But as we get farther and farther into the future with higher capability systems, you've got the ability to entertain up to everybody on the airplane.

Okay, but the best way for me to get better performance is to take everyone's laptops away.

You'd have a lot to carry at that point, but yes.

All right, I gotta get outta here.

That was great.

I gotta get outta here.

Everything is now a tech thing. In creative and humorous videos, WSJ senior personal tech columnist Joanna Stern explains and reviews the products, services and trends that are changing our world.