Rate limiting at 40k ft

I'm on a United Airlines flight using a pay service I've sworn off almost as many times as I've used the service. Free wifi to use the United website is atrocious so I decided to pay $3.99 - to post this. I was curious if the connection was choked or if (as I guessed and as held true) United had tiering in place. A true control would have used their $1.99 service on another identical mobile model and tested page load times. The real gripe I've got is that the personal device entertainment option isn't Available on this flight and I had so geared up for it that I'm now quite sad. Something as simple as distribution of locally stored video content to multiple users should all stay on local network and yet, this isn't dialed in in 2015. BYOD in this case would have been better as a big fat book