Southwest Airlines will equip all 810 of its Boeing 737s with Starlink in-flight Wi-Fi by fall 2027 — making it the first major U.S. Airline to complete a full fleetwide rollout of SpaceX’s low-Earth-orbit broadband service. The announcement came Wednesday, buried in the final paragraph of a press release otherwise focused on frequent-flyer changes and new lounge plans.
But the implications are concrete: free, high-speed connectivity across every Southwest flight, starting this summer with the first Starlink-equipped jet entering service. By year-end, 300+ aircraft will be live with Starlink. The rest, roughly 500 planes. Follow through 2027.
That timeline matches United Airlines’ own Starlink target (end of 2027), though United has explicitly excluded its regional jets from the upgrade. Southwest’s plan covers only its mainline 737 fleet, no regional partners mentioned. And unlike American Airlines, which pivoted to Starlink for its entire mainline operation earlier this month, Southwest didn’t announce a hard cut-off from legacy providers.
Its statement says it’s upgrading “all its aircraft with high-speed, low-Earth-orbit satellite technology”. Not necessarily Starlink alone. Viasat, its current Wi-Fi operator, is already lined up to resell Telesat’s Lightspeed service. Amazon’s Project Kuiper remains unmentioned, but JetBlue has already chosen it.
So while Starlink is the lead and only named system, Southwest hasn’t ruled out alternatives for the remaining aircraft. That ambiguity matters: Starlink delivers far lower latency and higher upload speeds than geostationary (GEO) satellites. Thanks to its ~350-mile orbital altitude and over 9,600 operational satellites. But it doesn’t fix Southwest’s other in-flight connectivity gap: most seats still lack AC power.
USB-only charging means passengers on cross-country flights may run out of juice before they run out of bandwidth. T-Mobile remains the sponsor of Southwest’s free Wi-Fi, a partnership launched in June that dropped the price from $8 to $0 per flight. Neither Southwest nor T-Mobile has confirmed whether that deal extends to Starlink or how it might evolve as SpaceX expands its own satellite-to-smartphone roaming service with T-Mobile.
The rollout kicks off this summer. The first Starlink-equipped Southwest jet goes into service then. The full fleet finishes in fall 2027.
GDFiled by The Gadgets Desk
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