Morgan Cole

Emirates executive Patrick Brannelly in new interview on why they adopted @Starlink: "The legacy systems weren’t working. No matter how much money we threw at them, passengers still complained, and it was impossible technically for everybody that wanted to connect to connect. Then Starlink came along saying, ‘We guarantee it, it will work.’ With a very pragmatic technical viewpoint, insisting on XWAPs, to connect 100%, and to install more than one antenna to handle demand and for redundancy. It was like for the first time, talking to people that actually understood how the internet works in a highly dense environment on an aircraft. It seemed our legacy connectivity industry didn’t really understand the core technologies needed to deliver customer connectivity happiness. But Starlink absolutely understood it. Now, in addition, the big fundamental shift from the first generation of Starlink was the evolution of satellite-to-satellite laser connectivity. So, if you’re a middle of the ocean, where you’ve got nowhere to ground the traffic, Starlink could just pass the traffic through adjacent satellites until there’s one over a ground station. That worked much better than I think anybody had imagined." Emirates has already started to install Starlink on its entire fleet of ~232 aircraft, with full completion expected by mid-2027. Customers onboard with Starlink are already seeing 10-20X internet speed improvements. (full SatelliteToday interview linked below)