Virgin America today offered members of the press and bloggers the chance to test its new in-flight Wi-Fi service - and as a group, they were uniformly impressed.

"After passing 10,000 feet, I was able to find the sky-high Wi-Fi signal and create an account within minutes," writes CNET's Kent German. "The service works faster than I expected. Yahoo and CNET loaded relatively quickly, and CNET's Kara Tsuboi was able to stream videos. I went straight to blogging, so I didn't take much of an online tour, but it looks promising."

"So far I've been getting about 1 Mbps down, and 200 Kbps up - pretty good considering that this is about as pinned as the system is going to get," Engadget's Ryan Block wrote from the plane.

"Virgin isn't the first domestic airline to launch Internet service; American Airlines has a pilot with 15 planes that have been in the air on cross country routes for nearly three months," notes Wi-Fi Net News' Glenn Fleishman. "But Virgin is poised to be the first airline to launch Wi-Fi fleet wide."

The bad news? "Your last bastion of Internet Free peace is gone - forever," writes Gizmodo's Brian Lam. "You'll be forced to work on flights instead of valium napping or reading comic books, and your boss will expect you to be checking e-mail. Time to plan a camping trip."

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