10 Megabytes?

Ohh I just opened internet explorer, and 10 mb gone...

Charging everyone including Suites ("First") passengers?  Really?

That's quite simply outrageous, given the surcharge for Suites over conventional First.

Surely this is just for pilot trial purposes, because the business model you'd expect to be sustainable might be something along the lines of:

- Unlimited access free for Suites passengers.

- Free access to a set limit for Business, then discounted charged access

- Charged access for Economy.

On a recent QFA380 flight I used a 100mb allowance checking mail and a few websites.

With the average web page requiring 784 kB of downloaded data, how is this even remotely useful?????

I'll likely be flying an SQ A380 to sydney some time in july/august, but unless they improve their offerings to something like at least 2GB, I doubt I'll try it out.

Even with some browser addon that strips images and reduces the size of web pages (downloading only text, etc), it still won't get you far.

The problem is satelite traffic is rediculously expensive and bandwidth is very limited. Given the minimal margin on majority of passengers, they have to cover costs somewhere.

I wouldn't expect unlimited traffic any time soon. I would think they could be a little bit more giving maybe 50mb. That's adequate for some basic emailing which is all you really need to be doing while in the air. Maybe a free 50MB for suite/F class, and a discounted rate for J.

Really we've done without internet for all these years, and yes it's a pain to be out of touch for hours on end, but let's not be greedy! 

elemist has nailed it on the head. Satellite costs money. A few of you may be aghast at the cost and bandwidth limitations compared to experiences in the US where inflight wifi is cheaper, faster and plentiful. This is due to the use of a ground-based network of towers which operate in a similar manner to mobile phone networks that are much cheaper to setup than satellites. 

When I flew the A380 service from SYD-SIN in July, my PC connected to the wifi but I couldn't access the internet.

I queried this with the flight attendant and was told they didn't enable it for the SYD-SIN service. Has this changed in the last month?

cssaus, yes I think it has. I too flew down to SYD from SIN ~4 weeks ago and although the 'OnAir' network was available the landing page said there was no service on this flight. I asked an attendant and they said that the Australia route(s) was not enabled yet.

However, I just flew down a few days ago and it WAS up and running fine the entire trip. That being said I wasn't about to pay $10/10mb! I would've hoped that SQ would do something like what Qantas is doing with their 'free trial'. The lack of discounting per class or FF status is also very concerning.

$10/10mb.....forget it!

 Recently used GoGo on a flight from JKF to LAX at a cost of $17.95 for unlimited access.

I remember using the previous inflight internet serviced Connexion by Boeing on SQ flights and it was signficantly cheaper. Used to be able to get about 3 hours access for about $14.95.

Ah yes I remember the Connexion one too..in fact I seem to remember an 'all flight' option too in the ~$25 range..much more reasonable on a ~14flight to Europe etc.