Am I missing something here? 99% of the flights I take don't offer Wi-Fi, and in most cases not even power outlets. And those that do have Wi-Fi seem to be charging 30% of my monthly internet bill to provide it for a mere few hours. Like, no thanks.
60% of domestic flights have wifi on them. My apologies if you are flying outside the US or using regional carriers 98% of the time (which might not be included here).
1: http://www.cnbc.com/2015/06/26/for-onboard-wi-fi-not-all-air...
(this was google result number one for 'percent of flights with wifi')
Just having a route as wifi capable does not mean you will get wifi on a given flight.
I don't get the complaints about cost, either. They're connecting you to the world from six miles in the air. It's a pretty impressive technical feat, and $10 is a pretty reasonable cost for that. When you really need it, it's very cheap, considering. When you don't really need it, well, your cat GIFs can wait until you land.
Speaking of which, I wonder if TCP-over-DNS might work with in-flight Wi-Fi. It worked well enough to get a crappy kilobit link at a lot of hotels back in the day before I had 4G tethering and stopped caring.
Why should WiFi be free like water regardless of where you are? WiFi in a coffee shop, sure. It costs about $100 to set it up and maybe $50/month to run it for the whole place. WiFi on an airplane? That's neither easy nor cheap to provide.
Handicapped people will rely on it to see, to hear. Everyone else will use it to slash and cut language barriers, doing real-time, face-to-face, cloud-based speech translation with augmented reality so you can talk to anyone, anytime, without any barriers. Indoor maps and navigation will become a reality, superimposed over our vision, telling us when and where to go so we aren't late, informing us of dangers, and educating us about the world around us. Self-driving robots, cars, and other gadgets will rely on constant, reliable bandwidth, and link to our calendar management services and travel planners so they can just show up without us actually even having to open an app to call them. Health monitoring devices will tell us based on cloud-based services if we encounter foods that contain allergens, and constantly update their data and firmware.
A paywall that causes even 60 seconds of interruption to this flow of data is going to throw off this technological dream. Internet access should be available worldwide for the same reason nobody charges you to breathe their oxygen. I should be able to board a plane and my data streams should handed over smoothly from airport Wi-Fi, in-flight Wi-Fi, and 3G/4G where necessary, without even so much as to drop a TCP socket.
Having uninterrupted access to the internet should be a problem that the world's infrastructure engineers collectively take care of, so that software and consumer device engineers can collectively abstract this problem away.
I'd even rather pay for water, whose supply can be interrupted for minutes or even hours. But please give me constant, 24/7 internet access, no matter where I'm in the world, with almost zero downtime, so that we can go ahead and invent what the 21st century was meant to be.
With water, they don't fall over in the terminal. Maybe out in the parking lot or in their car. But not where the airlines are liable, so all is well.
In-flight internet gets used for exactly the same stuff as internet anywhere else. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that, but that's what you're going to enable, not these weird new things.