Delta Airlines ‘rejects’ Starlink, reportedly wants to ‘wait’ for Amazon Leo; Elon Musk says: Delta wanted to …
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has responded to reports of Delta Airlines rejecting its satellite-based internet service Starlink. An X user Sawyer Merritt shared a post stating that “Delta rejected adopting SpaceX’s @Starlink on its fleet because it wanted to provide internet connectivity to passengers via the Delta Sync portal, instead of the Starlink-branded portal. Delta has since chosen to partner with Amazon’s LEO”. Musk clarified the airline’s wait for Amazon Leo claim writing that the exact reason was: “Delta wanted to make it painful, difficult and expensive for their customers”. In the post, Elon Musk noted SpaceX mandates effortless, no-portal WiFi experience equivalent to home use, making Delta’s approach customer-unfriendly and likely to lag competitors installing Starlink now.
Here’s what Elon Musk said
Not exactly. SpaceX requires that there be no annoying “portal” to use Starlink. Starlink WiFi must just work effortlessly every time, as though you were at home. Delta wanted to make it painful, difficult and expensive for their customers. Hard to see how that is a winning strategy.
How Starlink works
As explained on the company’s website, most satellite internet services come from single geostationary satellites that orbit the planet at 35,786 km. As a result, the round trip data time between the user and satellite—also known as latency—is high, making it nearly impossible to support streaming, online gaming, video calls or other high data rate activities.Starlink is a constellation of thousands of satellites that orbit the planet much closer to Earth, at about 550km, and cover the entire globe. Because Starlink satellites are in a low orbit, latency is significantly lower—around 25 ms vs 600+ ms. Each Starlink satellite constellation contains 3 space lasers operating at up to 200 Gbps, which together across the constellation from a global internet mesh.
Will Delta will lose customers to their competitors
In the post, Meritt claims that Delta will lose customers to their competitors because of rejecting Starlink. Responding to the tweet, one X user wrote: “No they won’t. Delta loyalists aren’t going to give up the report built with delta. You clearly know nothing about frequent flying. The WiFi isn’t terrible as it is, and waiting a year for high speed isn’t the crisis you think it is. Still the best hubs, and best lounges”.“No they won’t. Nobody books flights due to internet access (or lack thereof). People book flights based off price and convenience (time, route, during),” wrote another user. “Nope. Price wins every time. Sure business and influencer-class people may fly elsewhere, Spirit Airlines customers need somewhere to go. And they are not paying for internet at any price,” said a third.
