Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk continue to clash over control of space technologies, and this time it's Amazon challenging Starlink with a promise of record-breaking in-flight internet speeds.
-
Connecting an aircraft to the internet is an engineering nightmare.
Fast wireless internet relies on radio waves at very high frequencies, which allow more data to be encoded per wave.
But higher frequency means shorter wavelength, and shorter wavelengths are highly sensitive to interference from rain or clouds — making it extremely difficult to maintain a reliable internet connection on an aircraft flying through those conditions.
Additional challenges include the aircraft's high speed, which causes a Doppler effect that shifts the received frequency, and the fact that ground-based internet antennas are aimed at the horizon rather than the sky.
-
Two solutions are currently used to address these problems.
The first is ground-based antennas pointed skyward — a very partial solution, since there are few of them and they exist only in populated areas (not over the ocean, for example).
The second is satellite internet. The advantage is broader coverage and improved speeds, but at the cost of high latency and a physical antenna mounted on the aircraft's fuselage that must continuously adjust its angle to stay locked onto the satellite's signal.
-
Starlink solved the problem by using low-Earth orbit (LEO) communication satellites, which provide far lower latency than high-orbit satellites, paired with a special flat-panel antenna that has no moving parts.
The flat antenna is actually composed of a large array of tiny antennas, and beam steering — pointing them toward the satellite — is achieved through software and physics rather than bulky physical motors.
Steering the antenna relies on constructive interference among the waves transmitted simultaneously by all the small antenna elements. By shifting the timing of the elements on one side of the array relative to the other, constructive interference is produced that focuses the beam in that direction.
Amazon has announced a competing solution (pictured) that doubles Starlink's maximum speed to up to 1 Gbps download, thanks to larger antennas, higher frequencies, and more advanced error-correction algorithms.
It also promises installation within a single day, compared to Starlink's 10-to-14-day installation process. In the aviation industry, every day an aircraft sits out of service can translate into hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses — making installation time a significant factor.
Now we wait for Starlink's technological response. There's no doubt it will come.
--
👋 Hi, I'm Shlomo Strauss — follow me for more content on science and technology.