A field report from the 2026 NBAA Maintenance Conference connectivity panel — and what they didn’t say.
Starlink Aviation hardware is currently running a multi-month backlog. The Gogo 3G sunset and 4G launch has been extended to November 8, 2026, with the status of 5G unclear. More than 5,000 business aircraft are still operating cabin connectivity at sub-1 Mbps.
On day two of the NBAA Maintenance Conference, four panelists and a moderator took the stage to argue the industry should stop talking about Wi‑Fi speeds.
It was titled: The Day We Stop Talking About Wifi Speeds – Fast Enough to Forget About It
The chair ‘reserved’ for Starlink was empty.
If you’ve watched any incumbent technology category meet a credible disruptor, the playbook from that hour will feel familiar. The premise was provocative on its face: the industry has matured past the speed wars, and the real conversation is now reliability, mission profile, and the maintenance burden of chasing megabits. There is real truth in that argument. There are also real gaps in it — and the gaps matter most for the directors of maintenance who weren’t in the room.
This is what the panel said, and what I think it left out.
What the panel got right
The panel: Josh Wheeler and Steve Borger (Gogo), Jim Huntoon (Viasat), Mike Morgan (Duncan Aviation), and Josh Wilson (Executive Jet Management). Wheeler moderated. Three takeaways are worth carrying out of the session regardless of where you sit on the connectivity curve.
1. Two competing providers agreed on the same number.
Gogo’s Borger and Viasat’s Huntoon — different technology stacks, directly competitive commercial interests — landed independently on the same threshold for what “enough” actually looks like in a cabin: roughly 25–30 Mbps of consistent throughput. Wheeler reinforced it with his own data, noting a passenger maxing out streaming plus gaming on an aircraft pulled approximately 35 Mbps at peak. Above that range, additional headline speed produces diminishing returns on the actual experience.
“When you hit that 25 or 30, it’s more about consistency, reliability and having it everywhere you want. We have hit a plateau where this can deliver that consistent user experience.” — Jim Huntoon, Viasat
2. The first response to a Wi‑Fi complaint should be a device audit, not a hardware upgrade.
EJM’s Josh Wilson made the panel’s most operationally useful point. The average passenger today brings three to four connected devices on board. Instagram in background scroll mode burns roughly 500 MB per hour. Apple devices reconnect themselves to known networks even after the user thinks they’ve been disabled. ForeFlight, once a lightweight cellular-era app, can now consume 16 Mbps per device with weather and chart overlays running. Two EFBs running full-flight can meaningfully degrade what the principal experiences in the back.
“If you have a complaint on speed or performance, ask your provider how many devices were connected on that flight. You will be amazed.” — Josh Wilson, EJM
3. “Legacy” is a vocabulary problem.
Wilson pushed back on a piece of industry shorthand that quietly shapes upgrade decisions. “Legacy,” applied today to systems like Jet Wave Ka, carries an unfair stigma — implying outdated, slow, or due for replacement. His distinction: true legacy is Swift Broadband, Swift 64, BBML, technologies developed two decades ago for a different bandwidth era. Jet Wave and current Ka, which continue to be developed and which deliver performance squarely in the 25–40 Mbps range the panel itself identified as the practical ceiling, are not legacy. They’re established.
All three of these are defensible on the merits. I quote them here because they deserve to be heard. “Defensible on the merits” and “applies to your aircraft” are not the same question, though — and that’s where the panel got harder to follow.
Who was on the panel — and who wasn’t
Two service providers. One MRO. One management company. All four with aligned commercial interests in moving the industry conversation away from peak speed and toward stability, redundancy, and managed upgrade cycles.
Viasat and Gogo cannot win a pure speed competition against Starlink and the broader LEO category, inclusive of Amazon just emerging and promising Gig speeds. As such, they have an obvious incentive to reframe the metric. Duncan benefits when upgrade decisions are deliberate and mission-matched rather than reactive — that’s how a healthy MRO business is built. EJM operates fleets that already sit at the top of the connectivity spend curve, where the marginal megabit genuinely doesn’t matter.
Starlink was not on the panel. According to the moderator, every provider was invited; the empty chair was acknowledged on stage with a joking reference to Clint Eastwood. That acknowledgment is the moment to take seriously. A panel whose stated subject is whether the industry should stop talking about speed, held without the provider whose entire value proposition is speed, is not a neutral forum. It is a position statement.
A panel about whether to stop talking about speed, held without the provider built on speed, is not a neutral forum. It is a position statement.
Who the panel was talking to — and who it wasn’t
The session was framed for an audience that already has a 25–30 Mbps consistent pipe in the cabin. Newer Globals, Gulfstreams, and Falcons, operated principally by corporates and the upper end of the managed-fleet world. For that population, the advice is real. Mission profile matters. Device hygiene matters. The marginal megabit doesn’t.
That population is a fraction of the installed base (and the NBAA membership). The rest of the market — older large cabin airframes, mid- and super-midsize aircraft, and the long tail of light jets — looks different. More than 5,000 of these aircraft currently in service operate with cabin connectivity at sub-1 Mbps. Swift Broadband installations. Older ATG. SBB-equipped midsize fleet. Aircraft where “connectivity” means text and email-only (no attachments) and weather updates if you’re lucky.
Telling the DOM of one of those aircraft to “stop talking about Wi‑Fi speeds and focus on mission profile” is not useful advice. For these operators, speed isn’t a vanity metric. It’s the difference between a usable cabin and an unusable one.
The panel’s premise — “fast enough to forget about it” — assumes you’re already fast enough. Thousands of aircraft are not.
The squeeze the Have-Nots are actually in
Two facts the panel didn’t put together, but that operators on the wrong side of the divide are living right now:
- The Gogo 3G sunset has been extended to November 8, 2026. The Gogo Biz 4G launch is also tied to that date. The status of 5G remains unclear. The runway has been extended; the destination has not been clarified.
- Starlink Aviation isn’t actually the answer for this segment. It’s the option the trade press keeps pointing to and the option principals keep asking about, but the economics don’t work for most aircraft in the Have-Not population. Hardware in the $300K+ range and recurring service costs to match are a defensible spend against a $70M Global. They’re a non-starter against an older Lear, Hawker, or Citation, or any other midsize charter aircraft generating $2,500-$7,500 per hour. The aircraft that need the upgrade most can least afford the option getting the most attention.
So, the picture for the Have-Nots is this: the terrestrial system they’ve been operating on has a 6-month extension but no firm successor schedule, and the satellite option dominating industry conversation isn’t economically viable for their airframes. “Stop talking about Wi-Fi speeds” is not the advice these operators need. What they need is: where do I actually go, on what timeline, at a cost my aircraft and operation can support?
What enterprise networking would say about this
There’s a pattern this fits, and anyone who has built or bought enterprise WAN capacity will recognize it. The aviation industry talks about “speed” and “reliability” as if they’re competing metrics. They aren’t. They’re complementary, and the enterprise networking discipline figured out the relationship years ago.
In enterprise design, you don’t pick speed or reliability. You set a floor below which the link is non-viable for the workload, then optimize for stability above that floor. Below the floor, no amount of “stability” makes the link useful. Above it, peak speed becomes secondary to consistency, redundancy, and latency. The aviation panel’s framework describes life above the floor. It does not address the floor itself — and a large segment of the industry is still operating below it.
The conversation worth carrying out
The best moment of the panel came when Wilson was asked whether DOMs are equipped to push back on owners chasing speed for its own sake:
“There’s a lot of emotion involved in Wi‑Fi services right now. Our job is to separate emotion from rationale and science. There’s always going to be a plus and a minus to every solution.” — Josh Wilson, EJM
That’s the portable takeaway. It’s also exactly the framing the panel’s own composition makes harder to apply. Rational versus emotional is the right standard for a DOM in conversation with a principal. It’s also the right standard for a DOM evaluating a panel where four voices with aligned interests argued one side of a contested question, and the chair reserved for the other side was empty.
If you’re a DOM at the top of the curve, the panel’s framework may be genuinely useful. Run the device audit. Reframe the legacy conversation. Stop chasing peaks.
If you’re a DOM anywhere else — and most of the installed base is anywhere else — the conversation worth having is different. It starts with an honest read of where your aircraft actually sits, what’s available to you on a real timeline, and which trade-offs you can defend to your principal in numbers, not adjectives. Over or under, that conversation isn’t about whether to stop talking about speed. It’s about deciding for yourself, what’s right for your aircraft, not letting someone else’s marketing tell you the conversation is over when it’s not.
Download the full field guide here: https://www.apcela.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Apcela_The_Inflight_Connectivity_Divide_Field_Guide.pdf
