WORLD of Wifi

From a crawl to a sprint: how Starlink is revolutionising inflight wifi

- CHRIS CHAMBERLIN

The benefits of inflight wifi are obvious: work can be relayed, clients can be serviced, colleagues are within reach.

Daytime flights on connected aircraft are essentially remote work days and it just makes business travel easier. Even if you're not working, improved connectivity means access to live sports and the ability to stay in touch with friends and family. Priceless, especially for those always on the go.

Before reliable wifi, I'd spend an hour preparing my laptop with offline work - for every single flight. I'd land, venture to the hotel, and sync my inbox to respond to the day's messages before settling in.

Now we've reached the stage where wifi is becoming ubiquitous it's anticipated, especially in a business cabin. Soon, it'll become the norm for every passenger to be online if they wish and still be getting speeds that they'd celebrate on the ground. That's largely thanks to Starlink - a satellite network owned by Elon Musk's SpaceX, which is facilitating the fastest inflight connection speeds ever seen.

With Starlink (which has inked deals with the likes of United Airlines, Qatar Airways, Air France, Air New Zealand and Hawaiian Airlines) bandwidth-intensive tasks like video streaming are effortless, and video calling is a breeze. File downloads and cloud back-ups move from the crawling speeds of yesteryear to a sprint with a podium finish.

Browsing history

Of course, none of this has happened overnight. Back in 2001, Boeing spearheaded the first commercial inflight broadband service. Known as Connexion, it launched in 2004 with Lufthansa as the debut customer. Other carriers quickly followed, with Singapore Airlines,

Etihad and Korean Air keen to get online, to name a few. Impressively, this all took place before the iPhone was even invented in 2007.