American Airlines have flown the first jet with commercial in-flight broadband since Boeing discontinued their Connexion broadband in 2006. American Airline’s Boeing 767-200 made a routine, scheduled round-trip from JFK Airport in New York to Los Angeles International on Wednesday.

American said they expect to launch broadband on all of their 15 Boeing 767-200 planes within a couple of months. Broadband will initially be available on domestic flights only between JFK, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Miami. Termed ‘Gogo’, the service will cost $12.95 per flight, roughly £7 in proper British money.

Whilst the connection will initially be slower than home broadband, Aircell, who are responsible for in-flight broadband, promise speeds of up to 2Mbps, and say they will prioritise data to make sure one passenger doesn’t leave the rest trudging behind. Also there should be no annoying passengers talking loudly into Skype while you try to catch some shut-eye, because voice calls and chats are strictly banned. Anyone caught doing so will be blocked online, and cabin crew will be on hand to chastise anyone who flouts the rules.

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The BBC recently revealed that 40% of fans of BBC3’s hit comedy The Mighty Boosh watch the show via iPlayer, the corporation’s broadband TV catch-up service, not to mention the hundreds who tune in via YouTube. With amateur comedians springing up left, right and centre on the web, could broadband do the same for alternative comedy as Radio 4 did for Goodness Gracious Me and Little Britain?

A new online comedy for young Mums, launched by iVillage UK and Freemantle Media (owners of X Factor, The Apprentice and apparently everything) suggests this may be the case. Called Parenthood, the 12-week series will tell the story of five parents through a mix of short-form video blogs, written blogs, photos and message boards, according to Variety magazine. Parentshood will be the first online series that targets the parenting generation – women and men in their late twenties/early thirties that are more commonly reached via traditional media.

However the internet is a powerful medium amongst this audience with iVillage.co.uk alone reaching over three million women per month. Around 20-30 episodes will run each week, so that content always stays fresh. While initially available only in the UK Freemantle hopes to release the format internationally later this year.

“We see signs that this area is really taking off,” said Gary Carter, president of FremantleMedia Creative Networks. “It’s all coming to fruition at the same time.”

Freemantle’s new-media division FMX has already experimented with online stand-alone entertainment in the US with the reality show “LoveRace”, developed for video site Heavy.com.

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As an incentive to attract youngsters to its student bank account, Natwest is handing out £50 vouchers redeemable towards 3 mobile broadband service.

This comes as part of a promotional package which includes an interest-free overdraft as well as reductions on rail fares and £100 off a new Asus laptop. New customers will also be able to receive a Microsoft LifeCam if they sign-up for an account before 31^st October of this year.

Mark Worthington, who heads up NatWest’s student and graduate banking, said that the deal had “evolved in response to what students have told us really matters to them.”

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PlusNet have just opened their doors on their Broadband Summer Sale, which sees punters after a decent broadband and fixed-line calls deal able to make a killing.

Four PlusNet broadband packages, based on their Option 1, Option 2, Option 3 and Broadband Your Way Pro services, come priced at a lower than usual cost, provided that customers sign up for either of the two phone packages on offer (free evening and weekend calls or anytime calls).

Customers singing up for PlusNet broadband Option 1, usually fork out £9.99 a month – under this scheme, customers can enjoy the first three months at the reduced rate of £4.99 a month. Similar discounts roll out across the other packages – £7.49 for the first 3 months on Option 2 (then £14.99), and £9.99 for the first 3 on both the Option 3 and Pro packages (£19.99 a month thereafter).

Activation is free if you stay with PlusNet for 12 months, and if you already have your own router or modem, you don’t have to sign up for any hardware if you don’t want to. Of the two phone packages available, Evenings & Weekends costs £9.99 a month and gives you free evening and weekend calls to UK landlines, and Anytime+ costing £15.00 a month, gives you free anytime calls plus 300 minutes a month to 20 top international destinations. The cost of line rental is included in both packages.

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T-Mobile has announced that it will cut its roaming charges across the EU by 80% on the first of July, and the cost of sending text messages from EU countries by 30% on 30^th August.A T-Mobile spokesperson said “We will cut the cost of international internet access from a handset and mobile broadband connectivity via a USB dongle or data card from £7.50 per megabyte to £1.50, and the cost of sending a text from EU countries will be brought down by 38 per cent, from 0.40p to 0.25p.” This follows O2’s announcement last week that it would cut the cost of data usage in Europe to £3 per megabyte, an 80% drop for pre-pay customers.

European commissioner for Information Society and Media, Viviane Reding had previosuly given the networks an ultimatum to reduce roaming charges by the 1st of July 2008, or face a regulatory smiting. At a meeting earlier this month, she told CEOs “Do your job, respond to consumer concerns and lower your prices. You know exactly where you have to go.” The ruling calls for mobile operators to drastically reduce their charges for roaming and sending texts in Europe.

This will come as welcome news for consumers roaming abroad, who until now have had to pay through the nose for mobile broadband outside the UK. Even after a drop in data charges, the O2 £3 per MB deal still works out far more expensive than broadband at home - in order to upload a 200MB video to YouTube on the mobile broadband platform, you would have to fork out a whopping £600.

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Consumer concerns over the controversial adware outfit Phorm were brought into sharp relief last week when it was revealed that Virgin Media staff members did an HMRC – some 3,000 customers bank details were burned, unencrypted, to a CD-R which was then promptly lost somewhere.

The details, including names and home addresses, were allegedly taken from those customers who had signed up for Virgin Media services in Carphone Warehouse high street outlets.

According to a report published in The Register, Virgin Media have coughed up for credit file protection, meaning that customers credit histories will remain unaffected by any fraudulent activity which may arise from the data loss – good to know in these times of credit crunches and sub-prime slip-ups.

This will be another thorn in the side of the Phorm camp, who have been fighting an uphill struggle to convince consumers that their personal details will not be compromised by their cookie-tracking customer-relevant ad service.

Virgin, along with BT Broadband and TalkTalk have all agreed to sign up with Phorm, on the proviso that customers will be given the choice to ‘opt out’ of the service. Findings of a survey carried out by Ofcom which were published last month, revealed that more than two-thirds (69 per cent) of UK citizens are concerned about identity fraud and the amount of personal data that is available to companies and businesses. With the top three ISPs in the UK facing increasingly stiff competition from the other three snapping at their heels, any decision likely to alienate and drive away existing consumer bases isn’t likely to roll very well.

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Anyone who’s had broadband for a while now may well have noticed that everything seems to be slowing down. When broadband was all shiny and new, all of us who’d previously endured a much slower connections were gasping in disbelief as MP3’s were delivered straight to their hard drives in seconds. Now it’s a different story - connections frequently suffer from congestion; that single we’ve been waiting to get our hands on takes a couple of minutes to download where before it was a matter of seconds, and at times it feels as though we’ve regressed to the bad old days of dial-up.

As take-up of broadband services increases, internet traffic in Britain has risen accordingly, with music downloads, illegal or otherwise, and the BBC iPlayer listed as the main culprits.

Almost one million programmes are watched per day on the BBC’s flagship catch-up service and the ISPs can’t cope, leading to speculation that the BBC did not anticipate the popularity of it’s wonder platform. Under investment in next-gen networks has also been cited as a cheif cause of congestion.

Under discussion at the government’s advisory committee for broadband, headed up by Baroness Shriti Vadera and former Ofcom boss Stephen Carter, is the long-mooted prospect of unrolling fibre-optic cable connections for every home (FTTH).

However, this would be cripplingly expensive, costing up to £10 billion to connect every home, or £5 billion to connect every telephone exchange. Smaller, cash-strapped ISPs are reluctant to foot the bill and BT, having seen their existing network subjected to a regulatory carve-up has already expressed that it wont pony up without government incentive.

Who will actually pay for installation remains unclear, but two possible scenarios are emerging. In the first, as the BBC is generating more and more traffic, but cannot to pay for fibre-optic cables as per the PSB licence agreement (it can’t charge viewers for something they’ve already paid for). Broadband providers struggle to raise the revenue needed, which gives the government a good excuse to ask for a licence fee increase.

The second scenario could be initiated by the music industry - big players such as Universal and Sony BMG could make entire back catalogues available online for an extra monthly fee, say £5 a month, on top of regular broadband services. Deals struck between content owners such as Warner Bros. and UK ISPs such as Tiscali and O2 for IPTV content provision are already in place, so these deals could feasibly be expanded to include music downloads.

The additional revenue is then invested in improvements to speed and connectivity. However, it is unclear whether consumers would opt for this, especially if the BBC release all the Radio 1 session archives for free. Whatever the future holds, one thing is clear – as more and more of us Brits take advantage of interactive services and downloads, bandwidth is eaten up and a solution must be found if there is to be any growth in online business in the UK.

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Analyst firm Berg Insight recently published a report which estimated that the number of laptops with mobile broadband connectivity in Europe will increase from the 8.4 million recorded last year to 49 million in 2013, an increase of 34.1% year-on-year.

PC notebooks will have pre-installed mobile broadband technology for use away from the home in addition to a fixed connection. Once the majority of laptops intended for the European market have embedded HSPA/LTE chipsets as standard in the coming three to five years, users will be able to directly insert a SIM card into their laptops for mobile broadband freedom. Having said that, we’re pretty much already there technologically speaking; the plug ‘n’ play Dongles, available from the likes of Orange, T-Mobile and 3 are essentially SIM cards and a USB attachment encased in aesthetically pleasing plastic jackets.

The explosion in mobile broadband technology is likely to put a strain on mobile operators. In terms of volume of data, mobile data traffic already exceeds that of mobile voice traffic.

According to Tobias Ryberg, senior analyst at Berg Insight, serious network investments are needed if mobile operators are to keep up with demand from consumers: “On the one hand [mobile operators] have a highly attractive proposition – a novel mobile service with high ARPU [average revenue per user]. On the other hand, the very popularity of the service stretches the mobile network infrastructure to its utmost limit – threatening to degrade the level of service for all subscribers.”

Vodafone famously shelled out millions to invest in high-speed mobile broadband access, and are now reaping the benefits, currently able to boast the fastest speeds going.

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Vodafone have reportedly done a volte face and pulled out of their bid to take over the residential broadband, home phone and digital TV services of triple-play provider Tiscali, according to the Financial Times.

Reportedly, the two companies failed to agree on a sum which would see Vodafone acquiring Tiscali’s broadband businesses not only in the UK, but across Europe as well. The map to the right shows the extent of Tiscali’s continental reach. Lime green indicates countries where Tiscali operates independently, and the purple countries are markets where the Tiscali brand is present, but the company does not wholly own the service provided, like the AOL/Carphone Warehouse situation here in the UK.

Speaking of Charles Dunston and the gang, Carphone also dropped out of the Tiscali bidding war back in May. This leaves Sky, Swisscom and fellow Italian comms provider Wind Telecomunicazioni.

EDIT: The map wouldn’t display for some reason in the original post. The bug has been fixed, and now you can witness it in all its cartographic glory.

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Mobile broadband could become free to use as early as 2009, according to broadband comparison site Top 10 Broadband. In a bid to out-do competition, mobile providers have cut broadband charges dramatically over the last year, to the extent that further price-cuts could render the service free-of-charge anyhow.

According to Jessica McArdle of Top 10 Broadband, “With competition reaching its zenith, it is only a matter of time before mobile broadband modems – dongles – are offered free with mobile phone packages in the same way as ISPs such as TalkTalk offer ‘free’ home broadband with home phone deals”.

At the moment around one in ten people use mobile broadband to get online. However, with faster and more powerful handsets, as well as cheaper monthly price plans, broadband on-the-go is becoming a practical and viable alternative to a fixed connection. Huge price-drops in the mobile broadband market over the past year mean that consumers no longer consider it the luxury they used to. For example, at just £16 a month, Vodafone’s mobile broadband service is 65% cheaper and four times faster that its £45 deal of 2006. Top 10 Broadband lists 3, T-Mobile and Orange as other key providers offering mobile broadband packages which start at £10-£15.

Unsurprisingly, the drive for mobile broadband is coming from younger consumers. A recent study conducted by Sony Ericsson in over 30 countries concluded that 15-24 year olds increasingly expect the same service they experience on the internet to transfer to their mobiles.

“The youth are setting the scene,” said Vishnu Singh, regional manager for the Ericsson Consumer Lab in Southeast Asia. “[They] are now expecting mobile broadband services to be as rich as the Internet”.

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