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A Broadband Survey That Asks the Right Questions
Lauren Weinstein writes "I've just deployed the first ever Broadband Survey under the auspices of GCTIP, which asks questions that the FCC neglected to ask about service types, promised vs. actual broadband speeds, user satisfaction (or lack thereof) with their ISPs and local ISP competition, etc. I'm already finding the detailed comments many persons are leaving on the survey form to be extremely illuminating and with sufficient participation I'm hoping my reports from this data will be useful to the Internet community broadly."
Well... If I wanted to create a proper survey, I wouldn't use the free version of www.123contactform.com (I just assume that the creator used the free version, since it's limited to 10 questions per form and the survey has 10 questions...). Get yourself a proper server (IIS should do it too) and install a proper system like LimeSurvey (http://www.limesurvey.org/) - you'll find that more useful than some ugly online service. Have fun evaluating all those textboxes!
Or people watching NetFlix/Hulu or a multi-user home or someone who's video conferencing....
Your assumptions may have been fine 5 or 6 years ago but today they're nonsense and we're only going to see more of the same.
That page desperately needs text boxes to input all the answers about bandwidth/latency/jitter.
I filled out the survey, but sweet tap dancing Jesus do I pity the person(s) who have to turn the results into useable data.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Actually in communications the units are in multiples of 10, so it really is 15 megabits.
i didnt check out the article, but that's a youtube link.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fCLFKlYW3c&fmt=18
http://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
I remember Brett Glass! He was a columnist with PC Week or InfoWorld, back when it was actual paper, via US mail, mid 90s. At first he was a run-of-the-mill advice geek, gee Brett I can't figure out my autoexec.bat. Then he graduated to an opinion columnist, and wow did the bile fly! Right out of the gate he launched into some anti-MS diatribe, went on and on. It was quite funny. I remember thinking "wow, this guy must have had all this bottled up for some time now".
Check it out: www.brettglass.com has some advice on Windows 95. Sure enough, down at the bottom it's (c)1998. Ha ha!
A well-designed survey would have been born as an open-answer one first, administered, and the resultant data categorized into constrained responses. Then it would have been given again and checked for reliability. There would probably be some manner of factor analysis done at this point to identify patterns in the responses (make sure that items that should be similar are similar, etc.). Then you give it again and make sure that the factors or paths look the same. Then you'd give it for real. Each time, though, you'd need a unique sample.
Virtually no one does this, though, for obvious reasons.
So what you were working with there was a poorly-developed survey.