[Starlink] Testing airBaltic free Starlink in-flight WIFI for mining remote operations

[Sauli Kiviranta <smksauli@gmail.com>]

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Last weekend I was flying from Austria to Riga, and got opportunity to test
Starlink enabled in-flight WIFI now freely available from AirBaltic. While
flying over Poland, I did a remote control "fuse check" test on a robotic
camera in a Finnish mine 400m underground, some 1300km away from the plane.

Scenario: I did remote operations test to control the camera in the mine,
with the control loop from XRTC client running through the plane WIFI
(along with the 150 other users!) to Starlink likely terminated in Poland,
then to our XRTC based RTSP relay server running on AWS in Sweden, all the
way to a Finnish mine 400m underground, where we have the mine WIFI
connected to a AXIS Q6135-LE PTZ camera that terminated the XRTC
acceleration for the TCP traffic. Then naturally the full signal loop is
returning back same path in reverse with the captured live video to be
shown on my laptop in the airplane (picture).

[image: XRTC-Starlink-airBaltic-6-2025s.jpg]

Check the video below. What this means is that I could very well be
operating a mining machine, drone, or any kind of robotic platform from
anywhere, anytime, around the globe. Even if the target is full autonomy,
there will be many cases where partial autonomy is the path in-between,
like I was now controlling the camera in the mine.

Video:  https://x.com/sksauli/status/1929281402354147463

Pretty nice performance! Few hiccups in the beginning when opening the
connection, but after that it was quite smooth sailing... flying!

I do not think people fully comprehend what Starlink is enabling!

Best regards,
Sauli

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