In flight mobile phone service - ENGAGED

'Inflight communications company OnAir has today ended its contract to provide an in-flight mobile service to Ryanair. Ryanair said it was pleased with the performance of the system, which had been running on around 50 planes for a year, and wanted to extend it to the full fleet. But Ryanair said OnAir did not want to commit to this expansion at the moment and exercised its right to end the agreement. OnAir said the two companies 'did not reach a mutual agreement' on the process and timing of the expansion.'

It looks like the experiment to use mobile phones on-board is dead. Despite lots of flights on FR, i have hardly ever seen any FR pax using their mobile phones. I imagine the € revenue was tiny. What do others think?

Never seen anybody use a mobile phone in flight; but then, there were very few aircraft carrying the required equipment.

Some comments here :

http://www.flightglobal.com/articles/2010/03/29/340024/ryanair-to-seek-new-phone-service-after-splitting-with.html

All planes (10?) based in BGY are equiped for gsm...I just sent some sms for 50 cents each. It is very expensive but useful to say i am late/earlier...And yes it is fun to send an sms from 33000 feet. Calling is impossible (3€ calling 2€ called) but internet data for very small applications (skebby for example) is affordable.. It was useful if it was on all the planes...