Source: The Economics Times Telecom
Recent reports specify how SpaceX signed its first deal with an air carrier to offer wireless internet inside flights. The internet in the flight would use the satellite network of SpaceX’s Starlink. The private space company specified the news on Thursday, April 21. This comes as it struggles with other competing firms in the field to establish high speed internet on commercial flights. The space company is owned by the Chief Executive of Tesla Inc, Elon Musk.
The private space company has been in talks with airline companies to provide its Starlink internet in its flights for months now. Clearly, it has come across as a key prong in SpaceX‘s plan to gather around enterprise customers. Specifically, beyond the horizon of consumers and household in rural localities of the world which have minimal to no internet access at all. For a while now, SpaceX’s Starlink has come across as a leading company in such realms in the past few months.
The details of the Starlink deal:
This deal of the company is with the semi-private service JSX and entails the equipping of 100 airplanes with the terminals of Starlink. This would come across as the first Starlink- connected jet taking flight by the end of the year. The charter company specified the details in a statement this week. Moreover, a spokesperson from JSX refused to revealed the exact value of the partnership between the parties.
Till now. Musk’s Starlink has launched about 2,000 Starlink satellites to low-Earth orbit since the year 2019. Additionally, the services offers broadband internet services to several amounts of customers in a number of countries. This is despite the network not being entirely deployed in its agenda. The company is providing its service to those counties for $110 a month, along with the use of a $599 terminal approximately the size of a box of pizza.
All this while, the company has looked for regulatory approval from US Federal Communications Commission. This was mainly to function on airplanes and shipping vessels. Additionally, they had conducted a test of the internet network on a small group of Gulfstream of jets, along with military aircrafts previously.
The service provided by SpaceX’s Starlink on JSX aircrafts would come at no additional charge to the customers of JSX. Moreover, they would not require complications such as ‘logging in’ and others that are connected with legacy systems. The jet service specified these aspects of the service in a statement.
