Apropos my post about Boeing’s decision to drop in-flight wi-fi, James Cridland, who’s a serious earner of air miles, has an interesting view about the service.

As someone who’s used Connexions (the brand it went under) twice, there’s very little wrong with the service. The $20 for a flight’s worth of internet – nearly nine hours – seemed quite reasonable; it was reliable enough to make VoIP calls from while in the air; and it made a long flight much more bearable. If making flights like that in future, I’d make my choice based, to a large part, on whether the flight had internet access.

The problems with the service were pretty simple: power sockets. Wifi saps your battery, and without the business class power socket, you’re paying $20 for about an hour of use. That’s clearly not great value. If there were more power sockets in planes, and it was promoted more heavily to passengers before getting on the plane, then it would be onto a winner. I do hope the service is bought; it’s an excellent thing and a real boredom stopper.