Company says offering more suited to flights than ISDN Telenor Satellite Services is in the final stages of testing an in-flight e-mail, Web browsing and file-transfer service, it said Thursday.Based on Inmarsat’s Swift64 technology, the new service runs over an MPDS (mobile packet data service) link and is much more suited to in-flight e-mail and Internet services than Telenor’s current Swift ISDN service, Bernt Fanghol, director of program management for Telenor’s aeronautical business said.“ISDN is a fixed 64K bps (bits per second) link that has been used for video conferencing and high-speed data transfers. MPDS will be much more effective (for Internet services) because it’s packet based, and you pay for the kilobits you use, not for minutes,” Fanghol said. The MPDS service, at 15K bps to 20K bps, is slower than ISDN, Fanghol acknowledged, but for burst-oriented services like e-mail it will be more economical, he said.Target customers are commercial airlines, government air services and private business jets, Fanghol said.The service, currently in the final stages of beta testing, will not be commercially launched until Telenor, hardware supplier EMS Technologies and Inmarsat feel certain that it is completely ready, but launch is likely to be by the third quarter of this year, Telenor spokesman Tom Surface said Friday. EMS of Atlanta, was not immediately available to comment on what an upgrade would involve but Surface said he was not aware of any additional hardware being required.Pricing has not yet been established, Surface said.On-board e-mail and Web access is becoming big news as airlines try to differentiate themselves and attract corporate customers. On June 17, United Air Lines announced that it would offer in-flight e-mail on all U.S. flights by the end of the year. A week later Alan McGinnis, chief executive officer of Tenzing Communications, which provides United’s in-flight services, predicted that all U.S. flights will offer the service by the end of 2004. Technology Industry