I've several times been able to have video Skype calls in-flight and have made Skype voice calls many times from both my phone and laptop. Youtube works well as well. What's nice is EK measure quota much more conservatively than mobile networks as far as I can tell. The number of Youtube vids I get to watch in 500MB on EK would never work on my 4G connection on a 1GB pack.

As mentioned before, the connection becomes more stable later in the flight and most of my experience has been along the east coast of Africa and pretty near the equator which should have the best satellite coverage. Also not always full planes which helps.

It's always good enough for WhatsApp/FB Messenger, etc though

Use different e-mails and delete your browser cookies and you can re-buy th $1/500MB pack unlimited number of times, which is better than paying the pay-as-you-go cost once you go beyond 500MB

OnAir have a system that at the ground station and on board, they compress and cache for the benefit of the users - the latency is high anyway, so you can do it - and that compression is passed in the form of lower metered data usage.

However, the over-limit charge (on some of the aircraft) is now $0/MB so there's no need to rebuy additional 500MB packs.

Anyone who needs to rely on internet on EK should not.

Fine for facebook/sending an email but that's it and even that is not guaranteed on some polar/remote areas.

Speaking personally,one of the few joys of flying was, for a short period of time, being out of touch with the world.

Oh well time to get with the modern world I guess

You are not forced to used it! :)

No he's not (nor am I). But my boss also flies EK (on different flights for different reasons), so the previously accurate excuse of "Sorry for not replying right away, but I was out of touch for the ~24 hours between Sydney and Europe" doesn't work any more. ;)

"Sorry boss, wi-fi was broken, you know how it is on EK" :D