Starry starry flight...

The airline has become the first carrier in the MENA region to offer passengers Starlink internet connectivity, which operates from gate to gate.

The Qatari national carrier said it had aimed to introduce 12 Boeing 777-300s upgraded with the service by the end of 2024. It has further committed to rolling out the technology on its entire Boeing 777 fleet during 2025 – one year ahead of schedule – with the Airbus A350 fleet following in the summer of 2025.

Qatar Airways’ group chief executive officer, Badr Mohammed Al-Meer, said: “We are thrilled to launch our first Starlink-equipped flight, proving once again why Qatar Airways is at the forefront of the aviation industry.

“This milestone, paired with our commitment to rapidly roll-out Starlink across our entire modern fleet, demonstrates our relentless pursuit of offering passengers an in-flight experience that transcends the constraints of traditional air travel.

“By providing Starlink reliable, seamless internet on board, we are connecting people to the things they love the most even at 35,000 feet, making every journey with us a memorable one.”

Starlink is owned and operated by SpaceX. It delivers internet access around the world, including over oceans, the polar regions and other remote locations previously unreachable by traditional cell or Wi-Fi signals.

“Over time you'll find it just gets better and better. This is the minimum and it only gets better from here,” said SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.

With the launch of its first Starlink-equipped flight, Qatar Airways has achieved several industry-firsts, including the world’s first Starlink-equipped Boeing Widebody 777, the first Starlink on Qatar Airways passenger aircraft and the first Starlink-equipped passenger aircraft in the MENA region

This also represents the first Starlink supplemental type certificate (STC) for a Boeing aircraft.

As the first-ever service of its kind in the MENA region, the collaboration with Starlink, marks a new milestone for the national carrier.

Qatar Airways' has confirmed the use of Starlink for passengers is currently free, unlimited and wide open to everything from standard web browsing to FaceTime video chats, Zoom calls and even online gaming.

Starlink delivers high-speed, low-latency connectivity to users all over the world. As the world's first and largest satellite constellation using a low-Earth orbit, Starlink now also delivers a broadband internet service to aircraft.

Starlink is engineered and operated by SpaceX and foregoes the long-established inflight connectivity model that uses geostationary satellites in a geosynchronous orbit 35,786 km (22,236 miles) above the Earth's equator

Instead, it relies on a constellation of hundreds of low-earth orbiting satellites at an altitude of approximately 342 miles (550 kilometres) These communicate with each other using lasers with 9,000+ lasers transmitting more than 10 petabytes of daily data traffic.

A petabyte (PB) is a unit of measurement that's equal to 1,000 terabytes (TB) or one million gigabytes (GB). That’s a massive 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes.

The lasers can also sustain a 100Gbps connection per link, can connect up to 3,300+ miles apart, and maintain a mesh network with 99.99% uptime.

Starlink delivers up to 40-220 Mbps download speeds to each aircraft, enabling all passengers to access streaming-capable internet simultaneously. Data is transmitted and received via two phased-array antennas on top of the aircraft’s fuselage.

Because the satellites are only hundreds of miles high they offer very low latency, or delays, with latency less than 99 milliseconds.

As of November 2024, there were 6,764 Starlink satellites in orbit, with 6,714 of them working. The Starlink satellite constellation is currently the largest ever assembled.

A Starlink satellite has a lifespan of approximately five years and SpaceX eventually hopes to have as many as 42,000 satellites in a so-called mega-constellation.