Flew my first Starlink-enabled segment last night. The sign-in process was odd, as it kept opening the United mobile app instead of just letting me sign in. It took a couple of tries before the mobile app figured out what was going on (at first, it just left me at the flight status screen I’d been viewing previously). I assume there’s an HTML backup for anyone without the app installed or for laptop use, but I didn’t check.

Similar to Delta’s free WiFi product, I got a pre-roll ad. Dissimilar to Delta, I think the app knew when I was wearing headphones, because on my phone (no headphones) it was muted and on my tablet (headphones attached), it was not muted and I had to mute at the hardware level — I couldn’t even find a mute button in the app. And, again unlike Delta, the commercials couldn’t be skipped. Considering that I’m Lifetime Titanium on Marriott and have a Quest card, I didn’t really get a whole lot of value out of seeing the Marriott and Chase ads, and I certainly didn’t need to see them twice.

I’m not going to say that I would rather continue to pay $50/month for WiFi, or $70 during the months I travel overseas — but it was irritating to be subjected to 45 seconds of advertising before I could use the product.

Once I did get connected, the speed was exceptional, as others have noted. It was active gate-to-gate, although it didn’t seem to work prior to pushback from the gate — some part of the authentication system was offline.

I’ll use it again in the future, but I really hope UA makes tweaks the ads to add a software mute button and make them skippable after a few seconds.