Every score on this site rests on one distinction: low-earth orbit or geostationary. This page is that distinction in full — Starlink against Amazon Leo head-to-head, then every system flying on the airlines we track, with what it actually does in the cabin, what it costs, and the weight it carries in ConnectScore.
These are the only two systems this site treats as next-gen, they are technically the same idea, and exactly one of them is carrying passengers. That asymmetry is the single most important fact on this page, and it is why Delta’s next-gen score is 0 while its ConnectScore is one of the highest here.
| Starlink SpaceX | Amazon Leo Amazon, ex-Kuiper | |
|---|---|---|
| Flying on a passenger aircraft today | Yes — 15 of the 18 airlines here, 1,350 aircraft in this set alone. | No. Not one passenger aircraft, anywhere. |
| Airlines committed | 46 programs industry-wide: 4 fully deployed, 17 installing, 25 signed (July 2026). | jetBlue (2027, Amazon Leo); Delta (2028, Amazon Leo signed for 500 aircraft). |
| First in service | JSX finished its entire fleet before anyone else started. | jetBlue, from 2027 — a year ahead of Delta’s 500 aircraft. |
| What we can measure | 100+ Mbps advertised; roughly 20–80 Mbps in the cabin in practice, latency in tens of milliseconds. Streams, uploads, real work. | Nothing yet. There is no in-cabin measurement to quote, so we quote none. |
| How ConnectScore treats it | System quality 1.0 — the ceiling. | System quality 1.0 when it flies, and a next-gen score of zero on every airline until then. A deal you cannot connect to is not connectivity. |
| What would change our mind | A fleet finishing: once a carrier is at 97% the odds question dies of success and the interesting number becomes speed on the day. | The first jetBlue aircraft in service. That is the day Leo stops being a press release in this data set and starts being a number. |
airBalticJSXZIPAIRWestJetAir FranceHawaiianQatar AirwaysSASAlaskaVirgin AtlanticUnitedEmiratesAir CanadaBritish AirwaysSouthwest
1,350 of 4,678 aircraft across those fleets, as of 2026-07-25.
Zero aircraft in service. Both fleets run free streaming-class Viasat until the hardware arrives.
A signed deal changes nothing about the flight you are booking this month. It changes a great deal about the one you book in 2028 — which is why the race page tracks both, and why neither number is allowed to stand in for the other.
The rollout race →The last column is the multiplier this system contributes to ConnectScore. It is read straight out of the scoring table rather than typed here, so the primer and the formula cannot drift apart.
| System | How it works | Real-world speed | Reliability | Price onboard | Quality |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starlink SpaceX · Low-earth orbit, ~550 km | An electronically-steered flat-panel antenna on the crown of the aircraft talks to whichever of thousands of satellites is overhead, and the satellites relay between themselves by laser. Nothing mechanical has to swing to track a bird. | 100+ Mbps advertised; roughly 20–80 Mbps in the cabin in practice, and tens of milliseconds of latency rather than hundreds. | Gate to gate, including mid-ocean and high-latitude routes where geostationary coverage thins out. Degrades with a full cabin like anything else. | Free on every carrier in this set that has it — sometimes gated behind a free-to-join loyalty programme. | 1.0 |
| Amazon Leo Amazon · Low-earth orbit | The same physics class as Starlink — a large low-orbit constellation and a flat-panel aircraft antenna. Formerly Project Kuiper. | No in-cabin measurement exists, because it is not flying on a passenger aircraft yet. We will not publish a number for it until there is one to publish. | Unproven in service. JetBlue is first, from 2027; Delta follows on 500 aircraft from 2028. | Announced as free on both launch carriers. | 1.0 |
| Viasat Viasat · Geostationary, 35,786 km | One very large satellite parked over the equator, painting spot beams down onto the route network. The aircraft antenna points at a fixed spot in the sky. | Streaming-class: enough for video, uploads and a working session. The distance costs you roughly half a second of round-trip lag no matter how much bandwidth is available. | Coverage thins at high latitude and over open ocean, and a full cabin on a popular route feels it. Delta Sync and American’s free WiFi are both this. | Free for members on American, Delta and jetBlue. | 0.6 |
| 2Ku Intelsat / Gogo · Geostationary | Two Ku-band antennas under a low-profile radome, an older generation of the same geostationary idea. | Streaming-class on a good day, noticeably less on a busy one. | Widely fitted and well understood; the weak link is capacity per aircraft, not coverage. | Varies by carrier; often paid or loyalty-gated. | 0.6 |
| Panasonic Panasonic Avionics · Geostationary | The previous generation of Ku-band service, mechanically-steered on many installations. | Email, messaging, a web page if you are patient. Not a working connection. | Predictably poor rather than unpredictable. It is the fleet remainder on carriers whose "free WiFi" announcement excluded the widebodies. | Usually paid, and usually not worth it. | 0.3 |
Quality weights from the ConnectScore table · carrier lists derived from the same airline data as every other page · fleet counts as of 2026-07-25.
Both things are true and they answer different questions. Delta Sync is free, fleetwide, and genuinely streaming-class — you can work on it. Starlink is a low-earth-orbit system roughly 60 times closer to the aircraft than a geostationary satellite, so the lag is tens of milliseconds instead of about half a second, and it keeps working mid-ocean and at high latitude where geostationary coverage thins out. If your flight is four hours of real work, the difference is noticeable. If it is email and a film, it is not.
Amazon Leo is Amazon’s low-earth-orbit constellation, formerly Project Kuiper — the same physics class as Starlink. No passenger aircraft is flying it yet. jetBlue is first, from 2027; Delta signed for 500 aircraft from 2028. Because nothing is in the air, both airlines score zero for next-gen odds on this site, and we publish no speed figure for Leo at all — there is no in-cabin measurement to publish.
Because the two are unrelated. American launched free WiFi across about 90% of its fleet in January 2026, and it is Viasat/Intelsat — streaming-class, geostationary, with the widebodies on older Panasonic hardware excluded from the offer entirely. Free and fast are separate axes, which is why ConnectScore multiplies them rather than picking one.
That depends on the aircraft, not the airline — which is the whole problem. For United we hold a per-tail archive and can give you the odds for your actual flight number. For every other carrier the honest answer is the fleet share plus the aircraft type on your itinerary. The race page has each fleet’s current split and its finish line.
No, and this is the one piece of physics worth knowing. A geostationary satellite sits 35,786 km up; the round trip is about half a second no matter how fast the link is. Low-earth orbit is roughly 550 km, so the delay is tens of milliseconds. Bandwidth decides whether video streams; distance decides whether the connection feels alive.