Technology

Late last week, Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines announced that roughly 150 aircraft, 38% of their combined fleet, are now equipped with Starlink Wi-Fi, putting the rollout ahead of schedule. Alaska is also now running a public rollout tracker, updated every four weeks, so flyers can follow progress by aircraft type as it happens.

Hot on the heels of United Airlines operating its first transatlantic flight with Starlink onboard just two days ago, Iberia has confirmed that it operated its first (of any kind) Starlink-equipped flight last night when one of its Airbus A330s (registered as EC-MAA) departed Madrid for São Paulo.

United operated its first widebody transatlantic flight with Starlink Wi-Fi on board last night, when flight UA14 departed Newark for London on a Boeing 777-200. It was the first of United's widebody aircraft fitted with the satellite system to cross the Atlantic carrying paying passengers.

If you're shopping at a bricks and mortar retailer, you'll have to make sure that you know, in advance, what the items you're shopping for usually cost outside of the sales, but the same isn't always true online. If you're shopping online, there are a variety of sites and plugins that can help you track prices and one such tracker is "Keepa".

From what we've seen so far, before SpaceX will agree to enter into a contract with an airline to supply it with inflight ultra-fast WiFi, the airline has to agree to offer that WiFi free of change to all of its customers. On the face of things, that can seem great (from a customer standpoint), but it does leave us with the question which asks who's shouldering the costs? I think we should know.

The proliferation of aircraft equipped with ultra-fast inflight WiFi courtesy of SpaceX and Starlink is getting a lot of positive press right now, but at the risk of sounding like a Luddite, I'm yet to be convinced that access to speedy inflight WiFi is going to be a net-positive for air travel and for customers.

The latest airline to jump on the Starlink bandwagon is Emirates with the airline using the first day of the Dubai Airshow to confirm that it will install ultra-fast Starlink WiFi across its entire fleet.

Inflight Starlink WiFi has been described as a "game changer" by a lot of people that have had a chance to try it out so the fact that British Airways and Iberia have just become the latest airlines to announce that they plan to offer fee high-speed Starlink WiFi to all passengers is very good news.

Right now, ExpressVPN (the service that I use) is offering new customers up to four months free when they take out a new subscription and if you use the referral link that I've included in this article, that should give you one more free month giving you up to five free months of service.

Recently, we had Hawaiian Airlines confirm that it now offers a 'fast and free' Starlink wifi service across all of its aircraft and we've seen United Airlines announce that it will start rolling out free Starlink wifi to its customers from next year, and now Air France says that it will be joining in.

While this has been rumored for some time, we now have official confirmation from United Airlines that it had signed a deal with Elon Musk's SpaceX for the provision of inflight wifi across its entire fleet.

Safety and security are always the key reasons given when people talk about why it's a good idea to have and use a VPN when traveling but while that's clearly the correct thing to focus on, there's also another reason why it's a good idea to have access to a VPN when you're abroad.