Originally Posted by
Schultzois
As others have noted, TK gives this to elite card holders in all classes, as well as to business class passengers, which is the way I think any serious airline should be looking at the equation. So often, the time and resources spent executing the payment process for these passengers is really just a thorn after either the cost of a F/J ticket, or a complete waste of time for the passengers who are taking enough flights to hold higher status. When we're already at the point where this service can be sold for EUR19 on a 12 hour flight, once has to wonder if it's not simply better and even transactionally equivalent for the airline just to comp the service in the same way as extra baggage or free seat selection, both of which are already much more expensive than internet.
While I support that in principle, due to somewhat limited bandwidth of satellite connection, I would be a little concerned if everyone in J/F is given 'streaming' service for free (probably the slower service is not of too much concern). More people tend to use it when it is free, and it might just end up throttling down the capacity the extent that it renders the connection unreliable.
As I use it for work (sadly!) I really wouldn't mind paying for it. I have an experience that left me a slightly bitter taste in my mouth that I paid USD 50 for 50 MB (or something similar that was rather expensive) on SQ, and email transmission (with a fairly large attachment) kept dropping out, and it ended up with my buying another lot of 50 MB for USD 50. That was in fully paid F in the days when they were charging everyone for wifi. What was more frustrating than the money was the drop-outs though. It felt like the Wifi was a bit overloaded (as the satellite didn't seem to be dropping out, but Wifi was dropping out a bit), so I am a bit more wary of wifi capacity/satellite bandwidth problems unlimited give-aways might cause, although in this particular case had nothing to do with give-aways.
In other words, reliability is more of an incentive to me, and if it gave airlines less of an incentive to make it reliable when they are giving it away to premium passengers, then I'd rather pay for it.