Not sure who this is aimed at, the existing inflight wifi solutions powered by two satellites (viasat) are sufficient for tasks that don't require low latency.
Compare to what’s currently available to jet charter. StarLink’s product is currently priced (monthly) around an hour or two of flight time, depending on airframe class.
> Wi-Fi is currently available in the Phenom 300, Citation Latitude, Challenger 350 and Global 6000.
> The first three models have a satellite-based connectivity with a shared bandwidth going up to max speeds of up to 0.43Mb per second (depending on the aircraft type) while the Global 6000 is equipped with a new satellite solution called Ka-Band. Ka-Band allows for internet speeds that are ten times faster than the previous solution, going up to 4Mbp/s. It allows good internet browsing, including streaming or file download, and provides better coverage than SwiftBroadBand, specifically over Greenland. This is a very positive development as this area is mainly flown over during international flights on long range cabins. Due to the size and weight of the equipment, this solution is only available on large cabin aircraft like the G6000.
The most important difference is that Viasat uses a couple of GEO satellites where Starlink uses a massive swarm of LEO satellites.
Viasat's satellites are flying just short of 35,800 kilometers over the equator, which means that your absolute best case scenario user standing right next to a gateway, both directly under the satellite, bare minimum latency connecting to an internet server is almost a full 500 milliseconds. Users not close to the equator can add a fair bit more.
Starlink's satellites are flying around 550 kilometers over basically everywhere with 53 degrees of the equator, so anyone who has a gateway close enough to not need to use the inter-satellite link can get 20-40 millisecond latency to the internet in real world usage.
They only recently enabled end user access to inter-satellite links so I haven't seen any real world tests on that but it could be a lot worse than single-hop while still beating GEO.
As someone who recently spent a week at a vacation house that had HughesNet, you have no idea how wrong this is.
Every single individual request your browser makes has an extra half second attached to it even starting. Every TLS handshake takes a full second and a half, multiplied by every different host you're connecting to while loading content. Every packet lost (and there will be a few) has an extra half second to be resent. Downloading files over satellite internet isn't the worst thing in the world, but browsing the web over it is not an enjoyable experience. It feels like back when I was still on dialup while most of the internet had started to assume broadband.
The main reason QUIC exists as a protocol, aside from working around decades worth of horrible middleboxes that prevent new protocols from working on top of IP directly, is to reduce the number of back-and-forths required to establish secure communication which most significantly benefits high latency and mildly lossy connections like satellite and older cellular networks.
No doubt everyone has different experiences and tolerance levels for latency, but, really, I think the latency issue is vastly overblown.
Normal airlines are promptly going to need some no-phone-calls rules. (TBH I think they already have them.)
owners of airplanes
(sorry, couldn't help myself)
Obviously this is aimed at people that want: higher bandwidth / lower latency internet connectivity on airplanes?
this is trying to compete with the very high $ per MB and slow speed products that already exist from iridium and inmarsat.
"High-speed, low-latency, in-flight internet with connectivity across the globe. $12,500/mo-$25,000/mo with a one-time hardware cost of $150,000. Reserve now with deliveries starting in 2023."
https://go.viasat.com/BAV-Viasat-Select-Business-Jet-WiFi.ht...
... if you're ok being limited to 15 GB per month.
Practically, the offerings are $10k for regional or $14k for global for the no cap plans.
$2795 is for 15GB data cap which is nothing.
Their unlimited local service is $10k, unlimited global service is $14k
$14k is more expensive than the cheapest $12.5k from Starlink and less expensive than $25k most expensive plan.
Except Starlink is 350 MB/s vs. 30 MB/s from ViaSat. Starlink is 5x-10x cheaper per speed.
"Available in 2023". We'll see. I mean FSD has been "coming this year" since 2016. And I regularly see people here complaining that they're still waitlisted for their terrestrial Starlink service.
Who knows what ViaSat will have by whenever Starlink actually makes this happen (you know, with the mobile RV service that's "coming soon", and the maritime service, also "coming soon", and now this...).
I live in Australia (118ms round trip), and whenever I'm in SF, I'm amazed at the quality of life increase brought about by decreased latency. It feels like the whole net is on localhost.
I don’t know what is going on, and I don’t use either service.
Not sure where you pulled 30 Mb/s for Viasat service but it regularly tests more than 2x as fast as that (on the current-gen satellites, the newest of which is 5 years-old by now. Viasat-3 Americas has actually over 5x the capacity of Viasat-2 along with a big bag of other goodies that will enable a class of service heretofore unseen.)
Okay maybe that was too snarky.
It's for more low latency solution's and/or more bandwidth. It also competes with existing solutions because why shouldn't they compete in a field where they can compete and make money.