However, its availability on flights is patchy and hard to predict. So we built a database of all airlines that have rolled out Starlink (beyond just a trial), and a flight search tool to predict it. Plug in a flight number and date, and we'll estimate the likelihood of Starlink on-board based on aircraft type and tail number.
If you don’t have any trips coming up, you can also look up specific routes to see what flights offer Starlink. You can find it here: https://stardrift.ai/starlink .
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I wanted to add a few notes on how this works too. There are three things we check, in order, when we answer a query:
- Does this airline have Starlink?
- Does this aircraft body have Starlink?
- Does this specific aircraft have Starlink?
Only a few airlines at all have Starlink right now: United, Hawaiian, Alaskan, Air France, Qatar, JSX, and a handful of others. So if an aircraft is operated by any other airline, we can issue a blanket no immediately.
Then, we check the actual body that's flying on the plane. Airlines usually publish equipment assignments in advance, and they're also rolling out Starlink body-by-body. So we know, for instance, that all JSX E145s have Starlink and that none of Air France's A320s have Starlink. (You can see a summary of our data at https://stardrift.ai/starlink/fleet-summary, though the live logic has a few rules not encoded there.)
If there's a complete match at the body type level, we can confidently tell you your flight will have Starlink. However, in most cases, the airline has only rolled out a partial upgrade to that aircraft type. In that case, we need to drill down a little more and figure out exactly which plane is flying on your route.
We can do this by looking up the 'tail number' (think of it as a license plate for the plane). Unfortunately, the tail number is usually only assigned a few days before a flight. So, before that, the best we can do is calculate the probability that your plane will be assigned an aircraft with Starlink enabled.
To do this, we had to build a mapping of aircraft tails to Starlink status. Here, I have to thank online airline enthusiasts who maintain meticulous spreadsheets and forum threads to track this data! As I understand it, they usually get this data from airline staff who are enthusiastic about Starlink rollouts, so it's a reliable, frequently updated source. Most of our work was finding each source, normalizing their formats, building a reliable & responsible system to pull them in, and then tying them together with our other data sources.
Basically, it's a data normalization problem! I used to work on financial data systems and I was surprised how similar this problem was.
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Starlink itself is also a pretty cool technology. I also wrote a blog post (https://stardrift.ai/blog/why-is-starlink-so-good) on why it's so much better than all the other aircraft wifi options out there. At a high level, it's only possible because rocket launches are so cheap nowadays, which is incredibly cool.
The performance is great, so it's well worth planning your flights around it where possible. Right now, your best bet in the US is on United regional flights and JSX/Hawaiian. Internationally, Qatar is the best option (though obviously not right now), with Air France a distance second. This will change throughout the year as more airlines roll it out though, and we'll keep our database updated!
As solar and batteries become cheaper, eventually we can transition to most rural residences being entirely off the grid and self sufficient. This will also be cheaper and less resource intensive than maintaining the electric grid in those rural areas, let alone building it in the first place, and we can all stop paying hidden subsidies for those users.
Except it's no longer only in rural areas, grid connected utilities are now costing more than being off grid in the cities too. Starlink residential 100 Mbps is cheaper ($69/mo AUD) (ignoring hardware and setup costs) than 50 Mbps fixed line internet ($80/mo AUD). Depending on location, home solar + batteries will usually work out cheaper than being on the grid within the battery warranty period too.
Densely placed city users would strain the system, but cities also favor wired connectivity.
That makes the two complimentary. Wired makes the most sense in urban formations, satcom makes the most sense in Bum Fuck Nowhere.
I wouldn’t rule out the grid just yet.
Your comparison point is also a bit weird to me. If I want a decent speed, my choices are fixed wireless NBN at ~250Mbit (400 in theory, 250 in practice), or Starlink at ~200Mbit, and they cost around the same.
If I were just a few km closer to the city I could get 500Mbit fibre for ~$90 a month.
So while it's definitely not out of the range of other plans, I wouldn't say it's definitively cheaper. And I wonder if the recent price drops are down to people not wanting to have much to do with Elon Musk any more. I know it's worth a few bucks a month to me not to be a customer of his.
“When in Wisconsin.”
The most effective in rural areas is generally a combination. Fiber to a central location and wifi radio out to customers. I am monitoring a property on the west coast connected via such a setup. The last relay is actually solar powered atop an island.
Radio technology is truly the closes thing to black magic. I wish there were more places to learn and read outside of an EE degree
Again*.
In some ways we did subsidize the initial public phone network that put ma bell in the position to take over as an Internet backbone as "the Internet" became a thing. In some ways we're subsidizing starlink like direct grants of taxpayer sourced funding for rural broadband expansion and contracts that subsidize the spacex launches.
I do wonder sometimes if it's actually cheaper to connect a rural farm to the Internet by blasting a satellite into space vs setting up some kind of terrestrial radio based network like lora or microwave. That's not my knowledge area so maybe there are real, unsolvable issues that prevent terrestrial radio as a solution, but I have to assume blasting rockets into orbit is expensive both short term and long term, especially considering space trash.
In theory you could have multiple providers but it just doesn't happen much due to market dynamics and incentives.
In this case if I understood it well there's a limit to the amount of satellites we can send into space at those heights and that space is essentially privatized for free uncontested and ESA and China's CNSA already complained about near collision events.
So not only do you get the same market dynamics but practical limitations too and an externalization of costs.
How much global warming and environmental destruction is caused by launching rockets? A grid is built once and can be maintained for a very long time at a much smaller operating cost. Space stuff is expensive...
Wow, that’s a wild misstatement; that is exactly groupthink nonsense.
You (people) loved him before he went in for Trump.
The inflection point for the public was Musk calling the cave diver, who helped orchestrate the rescue of a dozen trapped kids, a "pedo guy" and then doubling down on it, again, twice in front of his audience of millions.
The inflection point for anyone in tech with two eyes and a brain was Musk insisting his companies produce products that do more than they are, still to this day, capable of.
First was around 2018, the latter was ~2016, although anyone who was familiar with machine learning knew models were not as capable as Musk was insisting they were, and that the hyperloop was a scam.
Oh, and when he lied about taking Tesla private so he could quickly boost the price of the stock. That sucks too. He's always sucked.
Elon is a busted flush. He promises the world, delivers somewhat less, somewhat late, if at all. And then layers it with deeply unpleasant politics.
Not groupthink, a sane reaction. Belated, but sane.
It’s not clear to me that we should necessarily massively subsidize their choice to live in the sticks these days. Starlink and 5G are great for this, as is solar energy and batteries.
We already subsidize sprawl’s expensive-per-person infrastructure with tax revenue from dense cities. As a country we need to make a decision about which choices we want to encourage and discourage.
Broadly speaking, very rural living is generally a lifestyle choice. Yes, not everyone can afford to live in big cities, but there are typically small towns in the general vicinity of rural areas that are quite affordable.
Of course, there are exceptions where you truly need the space, like if you're a farmer, but that's not most people in rural areas.
Edit: to be clear, I don't think it's fundamentally wrong or anything for people to choose the rural lifestyle, I just don't think we should be heavily subsidizing it.
'In 2024, median farm operator household income exceeded median U.S. household income by 22.7 percent'
'In 2024, the median U.S. farm household had $1.6 million in wealth'
'In 2024, fewer than 3 percent of all farm households had wealth levels that were lower than the estimated U.S. median household level and over 97 percent had wealth levels higher than the U.S. median'
https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-household-...
I think we both know what's usually happening: people in an area who, as a whole, are rural enough and poor enough that the economics don't really pen out well. And I'm sure said corporations would be happy for the local government to pay the cost of running those lines out -- if that's not happening, ask yourself why those local governments don't want to pay for it either.
Now if you want to say, "well I don't care if it scales badly, the federal government should just subsidize it until it works", that's your prerogative. But another option would be to encourage zoning and similar rules that impact how people live to change towards better scaling of infrastructure and services, so that spending on these kinds of things is more sustainable and fair.
people here don't understand how large USA is -- connecting every corner with copper/fiber, with all the intermediary networking devices means tax money...
We also paid $42 billion in taxes for ISPs to roll out broadband access in a 2021 bill, and it hasn't connected a single person to the internet
Before that, we paid $400 billion to ISPs to do the same thing with the same results
well even if I was the ISP, I'd just take the money and make the job "take forever"
None of the neighbors have cable TV. You've got to either go into town or t'wards the highway 7 miles the other direction).
Three years ago, the utility ran natural gas that far out. Prior to that, it was propane tanks (for the past 50 years) for heat in the winter.
The state capital is 30 miles away... so its not that far away from civilization (this isn't Montana or the north woods of the upper midwest).
When nano-cells came out for cellphones my father and I were the first in line at the store (that was 2010 if I recall correctly). It let the house be able to use a cell phone in the yard - before that it was the landline (and it was DSL for the nano-cell backhaul).
In 2020 when school was remote, their grandkids were there. Prior to Starlink my father got a Firewalla (for network load balancing) and got a second DSL link (it was barely qualifying as high speed internet) so that it could support two zoom calls simultaneously (don't stream music or watch YouTube while the kids are on Zoom School).
5G cell coverage sounds great... but those hills I mentioned earlier? You can get cell phone coverage at the house without the nano-cell... if you get a ladder out and climb up to the top of the roof.
So yes, to support the person I'm replying to - there are a lot of people who are 30 minutes outside of a city of appreciable size and are without wired high speed internet.
In https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/location-summary/fixed?version=... the area that they live in has 0% for 100 Mbps for the majority of the northwest part of the county.
https://maps.psc.wi.gov/portal/apps/experiencebuilder/experi...
That or Starlink may be getting a wad of cash just to keep serving them, courtesy of this administration's NTIA.
In the same way, we pay for the internet. Free wifi exists if you can’t afford service.
Rather than elitist, it’s just… not communist.
The economic benefit of making those people available as consumers, lowering barriers to their engagement in markets, is enormous and certainly pays for itself.
Good point, it doesn't make much sense to do that either.
> The economic benefit of making those people available as consumers, lowering barriers to their engagement in markets, is enormous and certainly pays for itself.
Or, we could zone areas to encourage people to live in towns where it's feasible for both corporations and the government to provide infrastructure and services at a reasonable cost.
This is assuming there isn't a good reason why we might want some percentage of the population to be rural. To have farms and ranches, for example.
Trying to create an elaborate regulatory regime to decide who is justified to live in a rural area is absurd and a waste of money. Especially considering that most people living in rural areas are either employed in a necessary industry that needs to be rural, or work in professional or service industries either directly supporting said rural industry (e.g. tractor repair) or indirectly supporting it's workforce.
Furthermore, the marginal cost of providing broadband to all those "slightly-less-necessarily-rural" people is minuscule. Skipping every other house doesn't save you much when the majority of the cost is building infra to get broadband to the town/road in the first place.
They can be in a small town in the region, which is where the school and liquor store probably already are.
I'm all for helping the poor, but we should do it in a way that gets us a lot of bang for the buck.
Especially when you threw out some lame strawman about Somalia. Surely you can do better than that?
Small family farms are defined as those with annual gross cash farm income (GCFI) of less than $350,000; in 2011, these accounted for 90 percent of all US farms. Because low net farm incomes tend to predominate on such farms, most farm families on small family farms are extremely dependent on off-farm income. Small family farms in which the principal operator was mostly employed off-farm accounted for 42 percent of all farms and 15 percent of total US farm area; median net farm income was $788. Retirement family farms were small farms accounting for 16 percent of all farms and 7 percent of total US farm area; median net farm income was $5,002.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-household-...
Estimated median total income for farm households increased in 2024 relative to 2023. Median income from farming decreased while median off-farm income increased in 2024 relative to 2023. At the median, household income from farming was -$1,830 in 2024. Given the broad USDA definition of a farm (see glossary), many small farms are not profitable even in the best farm income years. Median off-farm income in 2024 was $86,900, while the median total household income was $102,748.
This isn't (all) new construction of people deciding to cast off the shackles of urban living and shoveling sidewalks and deciding to move out into the more rural parts of the state... but rather people living in houses that are 50 or more years old that their parents passed on to them.
These are houses that were built in the early to mid part of the previous century that had two wires running - one for power, one for phone.
The idea that because you are not-farmer you should live in a city seems quite prescriptive.
People are living in rural parts of the country not because of the convinces of urban living, but rather because that's where they can afford to buy an old house and even with the additional utility costs (buying propane, septic, well) it is still less expensive than trying to buy a new construction house in the suburbs.
Last year I had a chance to talk to Gregg Coburn, author of Homelessness is a Housing Problem. We agreed that remote work and improved public transportation were the real solutions to many of our housing problems, allowing greater distribution of population back into more rural areas. This is an area where rural broadband investment could make a difference. Likewise, when we talk about American competitiveness in manufacturing et al, that isn't going to happen in our cities, but rather in more rural areas.
So, sure, yes, by all means do things like pass residential-in-repurposed commercial changes, ADUs, greater density in transit-oriented neighborhoods - do all the things. But, getting more people able to move to parts of the state (in my case, Yakima, the Tri-Cities, Spokane, etc) where there are houses just sitting around relative to King / Pierce / Snohomish... that's just as viable a solution and solves a whole bunch of other water / energy / land use / political / social type problems.
Over three quarters of all residential land in Seattle is zoned single family and the population density of the city is less than a third that of NYC. The geography is not the hard constraint in this city.
Sounds like you've found an infinite-value hack: let developers build infinite housing yet prices stay the same.
How many of those "random policy ideas into the void" were to lift regulations to allow people to build housing? Which sounds a hell of a lot simpler than figuring out how to make everyone wealthier without proportional increases in market prices.
People choose to live outside cities, but want access to basic utilities of modern life? Well, fuck 'em.
There are many small towns who will never generate the tax revenue to cover their $50M highway off-ramp and associated infrastructure. The thread was about internet, which has also been subsidized. We subside oil so driving long distances is cheaper. We subsidize food production. Electricity and water distribution is subsidized by urban customers. Even health care is subsidized.
If rural people actually had to pay market-rate for these resources, it wouldn't be cheaper than the city.
What would drop in price exactly?
Electricity would be cheaper. Here in California, a significant amount of the (very high) electricity costs are used to maintain rural power lines. If rural people moved away, we'd be able to decommission them and no longer maintain the lines.
It wouldn't happen immediately, but as more people become urbanites, we'd be able to move gas subsidies and government road maintenance spending to the urban environment, where we'd spend on more drivers-per-mile roads, OR shift to public transit funding, or simply reduce that government spending.
Over time, we'd be less reliant on cars, which reduces everyones costs, but will mean we aren't so desperate to protect oil interests, so we'd be able to stop paying for wars in the middle-east. Honestly this alone has so many positive side-affects it'd be hard to actually enumerate.
These things usually happen far outside of the cities. Without infrastructure for the countryside these things would not happen.
Small towns are or can be made to be efficient in terms of basic infrastructure/services, whereas truly rural areas where everyone is very spread out, it's somewhere between difficult and impossible to do that.
Conversely, having quality utilities in smaller communities could incentivize the building up of those areas and they would become less rural.
It’s the last mile (or miles) to farm houses.
The United States is difficult to invade because of the oceans surrounding it and the many people with guns in the interior that'll take shots at armies.
If you put everyone in a few cities on the coast, the USA becomes easier to invade.
In fact I am not sure if any country can get a troop transport near the US coast without being nuked to the ground first.
In any case, I doubt there is any realistic threat of a Mexican invasion beyond fantasizing from political fringes.
There are 23 million rural homes in the US and about 3 million miles of rural public roads. Let's say you wired just the public rural roads (ignore going from the road to the house).
It costs $30,000 per mile to put up aerial wiring. $60,000 per mile underground. So we're already at $90 billion for wired poles and $180 billion for underground. And that's just for the wires--we're not including any of the switches and routers for actual internet.
By comparison, the Starlink system cost about an order of magnitude less ($10 billion).
Clearly not every public road needs wiring. Then, consider that you could run wired connections to wireless access points to increase high speed wireless coverage. 1 wire to light up dozens of homes in areas which currently have no service beyond DSL.
And of course Starlink has to be for the whole planet, so just comparing it to the US would be a false analysis.
Of course you also need to upkeep the physical infrastructure. Specially if you don't put all those lines underground.
But one would need to do some more real work to compare. I would also say that a real program for urban fiber makes a lot of sense in more places. But I would love to see somebody take a shot at this, what would be the best if you started from 0 today?
Actually whats crazy is that you guys had private and public power run everywhere, and those companies had private and public fibre companies run fibre through those power lead ins almost everywhere that's practical. A feat thats honestly not been achieved anywhere else that I have seen. Lots of people in other countries stomp around wondering why private fibre doesnt just materialise in their house, when they have no access to national public utilities. The answer was local utilities. But there's not even an ounce of appreciation for it outside of the ISP space.
In the popular person's imagination, electricity is the revolutionary technology that enables cheap and safe lighting, as well as instant access to information (through radio). The telephone is the revolutionary technology that lets you call a doctor in an emergency or negotiate crop prices. The internet is the revolutionary technology that lets you go on dating sites and stare at pretty girls on HotOrNot, talk to fellow netizens on discussion forums, and waste hours playing Mmorpgs. It's "that weird technology that the young people use for God knows what." It's for entertainment, not serious business use, except if your business is in providing the entertainment.
Of course none of it is true, especially these days as so much non-tech-adjacent business is happening over the internet (and especially internet-enabled smartphones).
> simply running wires
Lol. Yes let's just ignore the most expensive and complicated part of the whole endeavor.
Those have just resulted in ya know... almost nothing.
Scott said: "It took time to negotiate, because we wanted to own the consumer data, and at the beginning, Starlink did, so that was hard, and then, the other thing was I wanted to let my big competitors in the United States finish their deals with other providers and get locked in so that we would — eventually, everyone’s going to have Starlink."
Brilliant. Just brilliant. Ensured that UA would be first (of the 3 major US carriers) to Starlink and that everyone else had to wait until their existing agreements multi-year expired before switching. UA's best CEO in decades!
https://stratechery.com/2026/an-interview-with-united-ceo-sc...
Consider the opposite approach. If they let airlines charge any amount for it, the airlines that installed it would make it expensive. No one would use it. Other airlines would feel no pressure to offer it.
By making it free, it gets used, and eventually depended upon. SpaceX are making free wifi the expectation from consumers on flights.
One word: marketing.
pretty obvious you never worked for an ISP and forgot about all the `middle of nowhere` customers who have no high speed internet.
even for me, in houston texas, we cant get fiber to the home and were stuck with AT&T DSL which was like $60 per month and ungodly slow. Also my GF and I both work from home and she does massive file uploads.
had xfinity not been available starlink would be an easy choice. ive tried 5g hotspots and they are not super reliable.
There are other, far worse forms of satellite Internet, so everybody has a readily available alternative. That makes it not a qualifying statement at all.
I'm an I.T. consultant in N. Carolina, and I've worked in very rural areas setting up connectivity for farms. Indeed, I have recommended StarLink on at least two occasions, albeit in concert with 4G/5G cellular (bad weather remains a problem). StarLink sounds great for airlines, RV's, boats, base camps, disaster relief--but those are almost all examples where affordability aren't usually high priorities, and I'm not sure if it's significantly better than upgrading geostationary satellite tech.
I do firmly believe that StarLink is, at best, a flawed solution to the largely solvable problem in the context of rural broadband access. We very recently had federal programs and funding to advance cable/fiber rural broadband services, but it was so weighed down with bureaucratic cruft that basically nothing got done. I dunno if that specific provision of Biden's infrastructure bill remains law, but I'm pretty sure it ceased being a priority after the last election (not for nothing, StarLink had plenty to gain by those federal programs dying, although I have no direct knowledge that Musk, DOGE, et al made any direct moves to stop it--I think it was mainly the shite implementation/execution by the Biden administration).
So "readily available" in the sense of "we could do it at any time, and it would be a helluva lot cheaper and more durable than continuously launching hundreds of satellites into LEO". Poor choice of words on my part, and even still I'm sure there's still plenty to disagree with there.
Funny how quickly my internet options went from expensive cable internet, to 1 gig symmetric fiber for $90, to 10 gig symmetric fiber for $50. And now, magically, Xfinity has 1Gbps+ service for $50 as well.
You can start a company right now and lay fiber in these places and start your own telecom.
You probably don't have the money for that but, if you put together a solid business plan, a bank would give you a loan.
You may not have the experience or expertise to do that, but there are plenty of people who do.
Why hasn't that happened yet? It turns out that laying down miles of fiber for a handful of customers isn't profitable.
Google dod it in a few places that were low hanging fruit. Places that had telephone poles where they could get relatively easy access to them.
There are certainly places where access to those poles is more difficult than it should be but most places are hampered by either being too remote to justify the cost of burying lines to a few customers (rural areas) or the digging is too expensive to many customers (suburban areas) because they'd be digging up streets.
However, there are a TON of places where the business strategy you outline is a great idea, and would be profitable.
..... until the incumbents lower their outrageous prices in the face of the competition, and bam, now your business model is no longer profitable.
I've been somewhat skeptical of the addressable market (doesn't fiber + cell tower network offer good enough coverage?) but I know so many people who have put it on their RV, their boat, or are using it rurally that I've started changing my mind. And the service really is better than cell phone networks, which are far too patchy to provide reliable service at decent speed.
And you can put it on standby mode for $5/mo, so you're not even really locked into $50/mo if you're occasionally doing travel where you want to stay connected.
And in places like Africa, they've had to tightly rate limit new customers because demand is so high.
I was paying more to have SIM cards for all of the big three, and getting much less out of it
Some trades now use them in there cars, they can use it for mobile service/internet nearly anywhere
Having a few 1000s of sats to cover the whole planet is crazy efficient.
This is very basic math. They need to launch more satellites if they want to hit their RDOF throughput goals and serve customers in the remaining areas. The most valuable extra-rural areas were low hanging fruit and already drying up.. the future addressable market is more dense and competitive suburban areas, which further limits the number of users per satellite because everyone shares the same spot beam spectrum.
But as you know well--having your personal connections to SpaceX it seems as you always defend them on HN--Starlink is about Golden Dome not consumer internet, so the private markets will fund it.
The price was high and the service was bad. I struggled to reliably achieve 20mbs at $80/mo.
Starlink is better than that, and it’s millions of people. 5g home internet is slow to spread here too.
Their market is large.
Or maybe it'll just implode. I hope not.
100 Mbps down / 15-35 Mbps up, unlimited data, includes hardware rental: €29/month in Europe, $39/month in the US.
200 Mbps down / 15-35 Mbps up, unlimited data, includes hardware rental: €49/month in Europe, $69/month in the US.
400+ Mbps down / 20-40 Mbps up (QoS higher priority), unlimited data, includes hardware rental: €69/month in Europe, $109/month in the US.
A good high-speed fiber connection is obviously better quality and value; but if you don't have one, then Starlink is absolutely the most competitive option you're going to get.
In Germany I think you are still better off with a cable subscription which also seems to be widespread in my experience and is cheaper than Starlink even if it's not as good as French deals (I only take in account offers without a contract for fairness, but if you don't mind you may be able to get even cheaper offers).
Another one I know first hand: food trucks. I do several events a year where cell signals get overwhelmed and cease to function, but I still have to process my credit cards. I’d say a solid 25% of food trucks are running these now.
Do you have any idea how much other satellite operators charge per megabyte or Mbit/s?
Why would you be "terrified" of space-based ballistic missile defense? Seems a lot better than ground-based interceptors that have a not-great rate of interception.
So, worth it?
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/musks-spa...
Or see T-Mobile away
I've got status with them and have started booking with other airlines b/c it doesn't matter how nice the seats are if you can't get any work done. Most airline revenue comes from business flights, I don't think they realize how important this is to their customer base.
The article is online.
The airlines have no problem with this. T-mobile has no problem with it either.
Regardless, having free high speed internet on a flight will motivate me as a consumer every time.
About the same work as filling out a hotel wifi login.
But you need to give personal information which also has value.
At most they could see domains, ip addresses, timestamps, and http-only sites (are there any left?)
But the person sitting next to you can see everything.
Privacy filters are a thing.
they are essentially looking head on at it.
that may work for business class, but not economy.
privacy filters aren't magic.
There's even two tiers of aviation speed limting: 300MPH ($250/mo) and 450MPH ($1000/mo). They know who they're targeting at both speed points (the guy flying for fun in a prop VS the guy in a Gulfstream that wants to Get There Now).
https://starlink.com/support/article/9839230e-dc08-21e6-a94d...
IF carriers were allowed to charge, they would piecemeal or handicap the service, and passengers would leave with a bad impression.
There are many ways to circumvent that, even while claiming to offer it for free.
Ok? You sound like you're trying to make a point. Make a point.
Also, nobody forces you to use the internet on a plane...
Does not sound too bad once you have seen the number of drivers scrolling their phones while driving lately.
Would you look at someone reading a book and be like "it's so disturbing that people are this addicted"? Is something Internet connected really that different?
(That said these days I'm thrilled if there is power on a flight.)
Do you understand?
… even then, I struggle to see what's so wrong with someone just trying to distract themselves from the hell that is flying.
Now, keeping in mind that you don't need my approval: do you have any questions?
I use the internet more than I'd like, and I agree that the lack of wifi (on a long international flight) can be a really nice experience.
Two questions: how stale does the tail assignment data get in practice, and do you have a way to detect when an enthusiast spreadsheet goes unmaintained? And what happens to your probability estimate when an airline swaps aircraft last minute, which seems to happen pretty often on regional routes?
> how stale does the tail assignment data get in practice, and do you have a way to detect when an enthusiast spreadsheet goes unmaintained?
These are updated almost every day so far, so they seem very up-to-date. Internally we track all changes/removals, so I'm not that worried about spreadsheets being abandoned yet. It's a good thought though.
> And what happens to your probability estimate when an airline swaps aircraft last minute, which seems to happen pretty often on regional routes?
Honestly our estimate right now is pretty crude. At the scale we're at right now it works, but I think you're right that we could make this more accurate by tracking equipment swaps & really drilling into the details of which aircraft get assigned to which routes.
I get a better 5g signal on the Jubilee line than I do on an overground train.
0. https://github.com/XTLS/Xray-core
So the best I've been able to do is a regional flight to a UA hub near me, and then a non-regional flight back to my home airport. Which is honestly probably not worth it. And it's definitely not worth doing a two-stop trip so I'm really excited for them to roll it out on their mainline jets!
Oh I actually didn't know this! Do you know why?
Edit: ooh, it's free! Because I have their credit card.
Not quite sorry, we only track the frames that do have Starlink. But if you check back a few days beforehand you can see if yours matches!
Indeed, wikipedia says their fleet includes 47 E175s. Consider my hopes dashed :(. Oh well, I don't usually bother with wifi on flights that are only a few hours anyway, but free Starlink speed wifi would be fun!
Feature request: Put a disclaimer on the fleet page that the tracking is limited. Or pull enough data to say "28 airframes of 47 are starlink capable" which is what I think most people will be looking to know in the fleet info.
Oh, this one is very doable and makes sense! We track this internally anyway so it's just a matter of surfacing it on the fleet information.
The proper term should be Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites, and there are other providers like Amazon [2] and Panasonic Avionics [3] that I hope other airlines would do business with.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark
[2] https://leo.amazon.com/
[3] https://www.panasonic.aero/blog/blog-post/what-is-low-earth-...
Neither Panasonic nor Amazon Leo (yuck) are operational.
Eutelsat OneWeb is.
How often do you update the dataset?
is there a speed at which it would break?
Honestly that wasn’t intuitive in my head but makes a lot of sense, thanks!
I've never paid for hotel wifi and never will, but I don't mind an ad on the captive portal.
[0] unitedstarlinktracker.com
Would it be hard to produce a pie chart showing top 10 airports with most starlink planes arriving/departing?
So sad
Meanwhile on the train 30 miles from London, nothing.
At least on my android, you could set the second esim as a "backup" that it would switch to for data if the main one lost connection (it took a few seconds, so it wasn't an "always connected" experience, probably because the phone wants to save power)
Lots of options if you search for "esim UK all networks".
And the clusterfuck when I tried to transition my account back to normal, where an $8 balance that wasn't reconciled triggered the suspension of my AT&T whole family account, but when I tried to pay, no-one in FirstNet support or AT&T could tell me how much to pay or where or my account number (and this is in the store), until a poor store and a poor phone CSR spent THREE HOURS getting it resolved. "I am literally trying to give you the money to take care of this." "We don't know where to have you pay that money to fix this."
I was an early adopter, but FML.
I was introduced to it by another HN poster: https://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/three-500gb-preloaded-5g-da...
https://x.com/greg_wyler/status/1116101020675977218
You can clearly see the tech had an older history at SpaceX pre acquisition
2004
I believe they also signed up a teledesic exec Larry Williams around the same time
It turns out the demand for really good internet everywhere is huge.
There were article claiming "$8b profit" but relabeling EBITDA as profit. EBITDA only tells you that Starlink makes money on a satellite once it is already in space and connected to a user. It deletes the cost of building the satellite, launching the satellite, the user equipment manufacturing, and just about all other substantial expenses. Not to mention payments servicing all their debt and Starship development.
The fact a Starlink satellite only has a < 5 year lifetime and ~2 starlink sats burn up in the atmosphere every single day is entirely left out as well.
They have never been profitable in any real sense. But that's okay, because their real goal is backed by Uncle Sam: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_syst...
SpaceX was in fact founded with the architect of SDI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin who went from the CIA to become head of NASA and funded the early SpaceX (10x from what Musk himself put in!)
Now in 2026, SpaceX is the frontrunner for the Golden Dome, which is an SDI reboot.
The company was always about Wars not Mars.
I do remember DC-X, mostly as when I was a kid, that program coincided with when the web became popular, and I remember (hopefully somewhat accurately) downloaded jpeg/gif files from NASA publicity releases of that rocket over my 2400 bps modem
Such a cynical take! Starlink made Golden Dome possible. It is easy to make up conspiracies post-hoc while forgetting that they were ridiculed when they announced it and the "experts" opined that it is impossible to do.
> SpaceX was in fact founded with the architect of SDI
This is highly unfounded speculation. Griffin went to work for "In-Q-Tel" after SpaceX was already founded (as said in the link you cited). There is no evidence I could find that they ever invested in SpaceX.
The existence of cheap launch and cheap satellites allowed the (at the time new) Space Force to pivot from large, expensive monolithic satellites to a "proliferated architecture" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Development_Agency#Launc...) at a much lower cost.
https://scheerpost.com/2025/02/11/the-pentagon-is-recruiting...
https://web.archive.org/web/20241213051851/https://historyco...
What passage in that interview says anything about "In‑Q‑Tel invested in SpaceX" or "CIA funded SpaceX"?
That interview is a NASA oral history of Mike Griffin’s career. It mentions his time at In‑Q‑Tel and later NASA, but it never says In‑Q‑Tel or the CIA funded SpaceX. You’re conflating "this guy once ran a CIA‑linked VC" with "he personally funneled CIA money into SpaceX," which simply isn't true. SpaceX’s early funding is well‑documented as Musk’s own money plus later NASA contracts as a customer, not a CIA equity round.
SpaceX (and Kistler Aerospace, Orbital Sciences etc.) was awarded contracts for commercial transportation to the ISS [1]. NASA’s role was as an anchor customer and partner under a publicly described program to get cargo (and later crew) to ISS via commercial providers. NASA’s commercial cargo program and SpaceX’s contracts are not secret. They were openly competed and publicly announced. That's the opposite of clandestine CIA startup funding.
DoD launch money for SpaceX (EELV/NSSL contracts, etc.) came much later, after Falcon 9 was flying and competing with ULA, and those are again launch service contracts, not "investment".
> Trump admin took this link down off NASA's website but it's archived just before the transition
That interview wasn't mysteriously "scrubbed". The website got updated and you found an old link that wasn't working anymore [2][3]. Not a conspiracy, just garden variety link rot.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Orbital_Transportat...
[2] https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/griffinmd-1-...
[3] https://www.nasa.gov/history/history-publications-and-resour...
> Griffin who went from the CIA to become head of NASA and funded the early SpaceX (10x from what Musk himself put in!)
Strawman eh? You pretty much claimed that Griffin funded SpaceX, and not just that, that he invested 10x as much as Musk.
Now you go around editing your comments. Lol.
It is not a strawman to say that what you said is non even nearly close to reality.
This is all very well documented. NASA provided the funds, not the CIA directly, so I'm simply not sure why you feel the need to keep insisting on that particular strawman argument. I do hope these facts aren't too bothersome just because they don't quite fit the usual Mars narrative.
Because, wouldn't you know it, Mr. Griffin was also a leader over at the Mars Society! He gave the co-keynote speech for Elon's original Mars Oasis pitch right there at their gathering. You can still find it written down in the old meeting agendas, if you'd ever care to take a look for yourself.
I've been in the industry for 35 years. Don't take everything these magical leaders say at face value. The reality is more down to earth.
Last year I flew roundtrip to the Philippines on Philippines Airlines. Each way they claimed they had internet and each time, they sent an email reneging the day before the flight.
The same thing happened when my sister-in-law flew with them a couple months earlier.
These are long flights during which I expected to be able to work. Just so infuriating.
The fact that it's powered by starlink is disappointing due purely to Elon Musk's involvement - but this is one of the better use cases for satellite internet technology. I'm not going to go out of my way to book with airlines that use the service though.
I am absolutely not, and I refuse to spend any money on anything even remotely connected to Elon thanks to his actions. His nazi salutes go far beyond anything even vaguely acceptable in a public figure like him, as someone who lost family in the holocaust I don't find this "funny" or "a mistake" as some people put it. The other day someone was trying to convince me that it was some kind of heartfelt "from the heart" gesture - I've never seen someone so delusional.
Feel free to stick fingers in your ears and cover your eyes and pretend that people don't care about this or that this wasn't a nazi salute - but Musk is exactly who he is, nothing more nothing less.
Planes are just about the least pleasant space to experience involuntary offline-ness. (That said, people scrolling reels with the speaker on (or the display at brightness levels making me consider sunscreen) should immediately go on the no-fly list.)
And the assumption that this view was drawn from nostalgia is completely invalid.
This made it sound like you enjoy me being offline, and that seems pretty selfish (as long as I don't annoy you somehow with my Internet connection, and on that, see my original comment).
I'm a big fan of offline gatherings (ideally in nature, which is pretty much the opposite of economy class on many dimensions), but I think this should be a choice.
https://labri.org/
My ~4 weeks were some of the most memorable of my life
I don't even watch movies or read.