Airline Wi-Fi in 2018: which carriers actually had onboard internet, and what it cost

A ten-hour flight with no way to check email or stream a film was still routine in 2018. A review of that year's top-rated airlines found a Wi-Fi market expanding fast, but still deeply uneven.

Skytrax's 2017 Top 100 Airlines survey — an annual ranking built from passenger reviews across more than 300 carriers — was used as the base list. After Alaska Airlines and Virgin America merged in 2018, their two entries were combined into one, reducing the list to 99 airlines. TravelStatsMan's Data Desk checked each airline's website that year for whether onboard internet was explicitly offered and, where documented, what it cost; airlines advertising only local-network entertainment, without genuine internet access, were counted as not offering it. Carriers were also split into international (at least one long-haul route) and regional (short/medium-haul only).

Of the 99 airlines checked, 67 — about 67.7% — offered internet on at least one route, as reported in that 2018 review, and every one of the top 20 ranked airlines had it. Coverage split sharply by route type: 53 of 73 international carriers offered Wi-Fi (72.6%), against just 14 of 26 regional carriers (53.8%) — a gap that tracked the rankings themselves.

By 2018, having in-flight Wi-Fi was close to a given among the world's top-rated international airlines — the real divide was in who charged for it, and how much.

The free Wi-Fi elite in business and first

Only 11 of the 99 airlines reviewed offered free internet as standard to business or first class passengers:

• Emirates, Garuda Indonesia, Turkish Airlines, Norwegian, Aer Lingus, jetBlue,
• Philippine Airlines, China Eastern, Icelandair, Gulf Air, Air China.

Two are easy to verify independently. Emirates' free business/first Wi-Fi was — and still is — tied to its Skywards loyalty programme; non-members paid roughly $1–$21 depending on the data package. jetBlue, by contrast, had made its Fly-Fi free to every passenger, in every cabin, since 2017 — a genuinely free offer rather than a loyalty perk.

Free Wi-Fi for every passenger was rarer still

Only 6 of the 99 airlines extended free internet to economy: Emirates, Garuda Indonesia, Norwegian, Philippine Airlines, Air China and jetBlue — most capped by time or data, enough for messaging but little more. Norwegian stood apart, offering genuinely unlimited free Wi-Fi across its long-haul 787 fleet and much of its short-haul European network.

Two technologies, one fight over bandwidth

Almost every system ran on one of two technologies. Air-to-ground (ATG) — the older, cheaper option, offered exclusively by Gogo in the US — relayed a signal from ground towers at up to 30-40Mbps, but dropped out over open ocean, which is why it powered much of Delta's, American's and United's domestic fleets rather than their long-haul routes. Satellite systems filled that gap: Ku-band, and the newer, faster Ka-band used by ViaSat and Gogo's 2Ku, beamed a signal from orbit at up to around 80Mbps, working over oceans too. By 2018 Delta already ran what it called the world's largest Wi-Fi-equipped fleet — its full 660-strong domestic mainline fleet — while extending 2Ku onto its international widebodies. jetBlue's free Fly-Fi ran on ViaSat's Ka-band from the outset, part of why it could be fast as well as free.

What it typically cost

Pricing followed no industry standard — some airlines charged by time, some by data, a few by the passenger's originating country. On domestic Gogo-equipped US flights, an hour typically cost around $7, with an all-day pass around $19; on ViaSat-equipped American Airlines aircraft, a two-hour pass ran about $12 and a full-flight pass about $16.

Where the gaps remained, and what's changed since

Slower adoption wasn't limited to small regional carriers. Cathay Pacific, one of Asia's most highly rated airlines, only began fitting Gogo's 2Ku satellite system to its widebody fleet in mid-2018, and didn't commit to covering its entire long-haul fleet until the end of 2019 — a reminder that even prominent international carriers were still catching up. In general, the further down the Skytrax rankings an airline sat, the less likely it was to offer onboard internet at all. Coverage and speed have both moved on considerably since: free basic Wi-Fi, once mostly a loyalty perk or a low-cost carrier's marketing hook, has become standard on many major airlines' domestic fleets, and satellite bandwidth per aircraft has climbed well past the roughly 80Mbps ceiling that defined the fastest 2018 systems.

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