High-speed, low-latency, in-flight internet will cost each airplane $12,500/mo-$25,000/mo with a one-time hardware cost of $150,000. Deliveries will start 2023.
Starlink has been available for cruise ships and private ships with up to 350 Mbps download while at sea. $5,000/mo with a one-time hardware cost of $10,000 for two high performance terminals.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
He also partnered with Elmo and Best Chef to inform the nation about vaccines and healthier consuming, respectively.
Airlines will cheerfully pay these prices. In flight WiFi is a serious money maker for airlines.
Yep. Some people complained that 350 Mbps is not enough for a airplane full of streaming, videoconferencing, remote desktop user.
Well, true, but who said it was a freebie all-you-can-eat buffet?
The airlines know they have a captive market there and therefore resell their wifi.
Googling this…
Looks like the hardware is very different from the ground based antennas we have seen so far. For aircraft, they use a big, square, phased antenna that must be mounted on the exterior of the aircraft. The renderings show something that must affect aerodynamics.
The hardware kit also includes the wifi network stuff, power supplies etc. for the interior and connection to the users. Some airliners have already signed up for it.
Is this is just charging what the market will bear? Would StarLink on an aircraft really use up that much more bandwidth or otherwise be ~100x harder to support?
OTOH, if you get an airliner or two flying overhead, does your residential StarLink peformance fall flat for a while, due to their high demand?
Most likely yes. These are high tier customers paying a good buck for the service.
They are probably assuming a continuous growth of satellites and bandwidth, to accomodate the needs of these customers and the rest.
Its a simple mathematical case:
1. Each Starlink v1.0/V1.5 can support upto 20Gbps
2. Currently every Starlink sat cover a moving area of ~200,000 KM^2 (that number will go down as more sats are launched)
3. 200 passengers streaming videos will easily use all 350mbps per airplane
4. If the residential Starlink terminal is near major air traffic routes then there might be several 10s planes above its 200,000 KM^2 area
5. Thus planes combined may take as high as 10Gbps, or half the avilable bandwidth.
6. As we already know, in many areas Starlink have to many costumers taking down the avilable capacity per user, adding planes to this will cause an avoidable disturbances to the service quality.
Note: Since airliners move slowly, it will take some time until most of the planes will have Starlink installed. In the meanwhile SpaceX will hopefully start massive deployment of Starlink V2.0 each with 4-5X capacity. The affect of a much smaller service area per sat, and much higher capacity, will mean fewer planes that takes only a small portion of the total BW, maybe as small as 5%.
Aircraft can cache the movies on offer, plus major news/talk feeds before they load. Web surfing doesn’t use much bandwidth. If there’s any single thing that epitomizes Musk, it’s innovation on the fly => system BW will grow.
Elon creates cash cornucopias. What do you suppose he charges DOD/NSA/CIA for 1-2 cu ft, 10-20 lbs payload on the next gen Starlink birds? That will provide GPS capability with a data/software change.
just don’t live on the Heathrow flight path with 1plane/5min)
of course elon would say that those in the flight path areas are probably closer to dense cities so this really isnt for them to begin with
Electronic devices are stowed on final approach so no bandwidth consumption.