A pair of AP stories addresses Boeing's Connexion failure and in-flight etiquette for Internet access: The AP's Anick Jesdanun, who has written a series of detailed articles about the bloom in upcoming in-flight broadband and mobile services, files these two articles on specific aspects of the issue.
He writes about Connexion by Boeing, a service that more or less worked as advertised technologically--I heard many rumors about problems, but also knew many, many happy users--but that didn't have the right combination of weight and cost structure to "fly." As the article points out, and I've learned in the last year from extensive interviews, Boeing's system was out of date by the time it went up, and they had committed early on to extensive, expensive satellite contracts. Rivals and upstarts alike think they have the right combination.
Pricing is starting to be disclosed more and more. AirCell is clearly intending to charge about $10 for a domestic flight, which is pretty much what they estimated the cost would be all along. I expect there will be subsidies and deals for frequent fliers, potentially a monthly unlimited subscription (as AirCell has fixed bandwidth costs once the system is built), and partnerships with aggregators to lower costs for corporations.
In a related article, Jesdanun discusses whether and how airlines will deal with inappropriate behavior during conversations and in content viewing up in the sky. The various service providers will offer filtering of different kinds: Panasonic Avionics will filter for porn and violence, while AirCell will disable Internet telephony and voice chat. (Those who think you can get around that with a VPN or other purposes just need to remember that service providers can add jitter and such that will make calls indecipherable without affecting other sorts of data transmission.)