Qatar Airways continues to outperform its Starlink deployment plan. The carrier appears to be benefitting from an incredibly quick aircraft turn time for the work as nearly a quarter of its 777 fleet is now confirmed as carrying the kit on board.

Just seven weeks ago, as the first retrofit aircraft took flight, Qatar Airways altered its anticipated installation pacing, expecting to complete 12 aircraft in the last quarter of the year, an increase from the initially planned three. It has now surpassed 15 fitted, and there’s still a couple weeks yet to go.

A review of aircraft operating history suggests the entire conversion process is occurring in less than 24 hours on the ground at Doha. Consider A7-BAF, the plane that operated the Doha-Toronto inaugural and which the airline highlighted as a recent install. The longest sit it had in Doha since the first Starlink conversion entered service was from 4:49pm on 29 November to 9:56am on 30 November. Allowing for time to tow the plane to and from the hangar, this would imply an installation windows of about 12 hours.

This pacing parallels that of the Hawaiian A330 fleet and its A321neo installs. While other IFC providers eventually got to such speedy installation timelines, Starlink managed to make it happen earlier in its product lifecycle, an impressive accomplishment. Those other vendors were also typically performing a clean install. For these conversions Qatar Airways is also removing the legacy hardware from the aircraft.

Also similar to Hawaiian, the Starlink install on Qatar Airways is flying with two antenna terminals atop the fuselage. In conversations earlier this summer a SpaceX executive suggested a quad terminal approach aimed to deliver about 2 Gbps of capacity to each aircraft. They noted that the terminals today support just under 250 Mbps, and that planned updates to the permissible power levels would eventually double that. By installing four of the terminals they would provide what was believed to be a “future-proof” deployment for airlines. But that quad-terminal config appear to have been shelved, at least for now.

Keeping just two networks on the aircraft does offer some simplicity in terms of the wireless network configuration inside the plane. Starlink deployed initially with each terminal offering an isolated network, not a unified mesh on board. Updates to that configuration are possible, however, with one executive explaining, “If you have 100 megabits to the plane [the local WLAN] doesn’t really matter; if you’re trying to do a few gigabits you really need to nail the Wi-Fi.” Perhaps getting to four on board – and eight APs – was simply overkill for what’s actually needed.

Another executive in the Starlink program suggested that switching from isolated networks for each terminal to a mesh design “is simple networking” but also noted it comes with tradeoffs that are not always worthwhile. They declined to elaborate on the negative aspects of such options.