Southwest Airlines Just Made Flying a Lot Less Boring, Thanks to Starlink

Southwest Airlines has just announced that it will be putting Starlink on board. As a result, extremely fast Wi-Fi will begin to appear on flights this summer. Southwest intends to equip more than 300 Boeing 737 planes with this technology by the end of the year, representing a major chunk of their fleet.

This implies that passengers on the trip will be able to do almost whatever they can at home, such as stream shows from their preferred platform, watch live sports, listen to music, play games, get some work done, or simply check up with friends and family on the ground. The good news is that this works from the minute the plane takes off until it lands, with no failed connections or unpleasant buffering screens. To top it all off, the service will be free, which is a welcome follow-up to Southwest’s recent decision to eliminate Wi-Fi prices entirely.

Southwest’s chief customer and brand officer, Tony Roach, was quite clear on the concept: basically, Starlink provides an at-home experience in the air, allowing passengers to take care of all their gadget needs without difficulty. The company has already seen how popular free Wi-Fi is among their Rapid Rewards members, and this improvement is the latest step toward meeting customer expectations for constant connectivity on tablets, laptops, phones, and other devices.


Southwest flies to 11 nations, thus their system must be reliable in a variety of conditions and routes. Starlink is a fairly remarkable piece of technology since it uses low-Earth orbit satellites that operate in Ku-band and have substantially lower latency than older geostationary systems. This basically implies that video calls are smoother, site loads are faster, and there are less interruptions, even when you’re cruising through the air.

Existing partners will remain in the game for the time being, with Anuvu handling current geostationary Ku-band service and live TV, and Viasat continuing to operate Ka-band on newer planes. Southwest intends to incorporate Starlink alongside these, emphasizing the LEO system’s benefits for everyday passenger use, but they have yet to announce any changes to live TV or other capabilities.

This is just another indicator that SouthWest is joining a long list of airlines that are embracing Starlink. United, Alaska, Delta affiliates, and numerous international names have already committed to full or partial Starlink deployments. What really sticks out here is how quickly Southwest is moving on this; upgrading hundreds of planes in under a year is an ambitious plan.