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."

Comments

Getting relevant responses? Gosh!

[BadAnalogyGuy]

This is a self-selected survey

You're getting relevant responses from people who are already actively interested in discussing the topic? Will wonders never cease?

In the source of the page:

[trickotomy]

""

really? really?!

The Australian Broadband Survey... compare?

[mitchells00]

Shouldn't one run a survey much like the Australian Broadband survey? I mean, really, your survey is limited and open ended. With the ABs, it's interesting comparing the results from year to year... http://whirlpool.net.au/survey/2009/ http://whirlpool.net.au/survey/2008/ http://whirlpool.net.au/survey/2007/ http://whirlpool.net.au/survey/2006/ http://whirlpool.net.au/survey/2005/ http://whirlpool.net.au/survey/2004/ http://whirlpool.net.au/survey/2003/ This is how a survey should be done! We actually have serious issues with our ISP's here, so this is done to perhaps give them a bit of a kick up the arse.

Rigged Bandwidth Testing

[bengoerz]

I challenge whether you can even trust bandwidth tests. The OOKLA-powered bandwidth test on Broadband.gov shows 80Mbit down on my 10Mbit connection. I never see similar numbers from any other source. So, perhaps my ISP (Time Warner) is pulling one over?

Re:I teach survey design... This is terrible.

[Anonymous Coward]

So, you are the guy responsible for all these horrible cookie cutter type surveys.

You see them over and over again. Multiple choice and the answer isn't one of the choices. Talk about invalidating the results. Nothing borks the results more than forcing someone to give inaccurate answers to complete the survey.

I used to work for a survey company and hear the frustration all night long. Frustration compounded by the fact that I wasn't allowed to give any explanation or even apologize lest I corrupt the data.

For example, I gave a government sponsored survey on the effectiveness of seat belt advertising campaigns. The entire survey consisted of questions and answers that didn't fit if someone wasn't in favor of government enforced seat belt laws in the first place... 20 mins of them.

Re:I teach survey design... This is terrible.

[story645]

Do you know what they are driving at?

They're trying to figure out if you're lying, trying to make yourself look good, trying to make yourself look bad, or otherwise screwing with the survey answers. They actually need to be about 10 pages for reliability purposes and the like. The field is called psychometrics, and I've gotta agree with the OP on his rant. I just looked at the data someone collected for her masters thesis, and it's all open ended survey stuff, so she's crying at the thought of getting it into a usable form in SPSS and a good chunk of the data will either have to chucked or reworked to get anything useful out of it.

Re:Fast Enough

[adamofgreyskull]

768k DSL is fast enough for most people - posting on Facebook, checking CNN, sending webmail. The people who need 10MBit are the warez hounds and ISO downloaders.

This was true, and possibly still is true for some values of "most people", but there are quite a few uses for broadband which are legal, increasingly mainstream, and which greatly benefit from increased bandwidth. E.g. Legitimately buying/downloading games (Steam,2dBoy,Telltale Games), watching streaming video (BBC iPlayer, Netflix), working/video-conferencing from home. Arguably, if all your strawman is doing is "posting on Facebook, checking CNN, sending webmail" there's no real reason to have any more than 56k or maybe 128k ISDN, except that would make watching their friends'/CNNs' embedded video or opening that attachment of the panda sneezing an incredibly painful endeavour.

10Mbit is certainly not a necessity to most people, but 768k is simply pathetic by today's standards. For one person, it's bad enough, but as soon as you have more than a couple of people (family home/student house) with the aforementioned increasingly typical use cases (streaming media/large downloads) who want to do different things at the same time, 768k soon becomes saturated.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Fast Enough

[Nikker]

I used to think about the same, I would consider my self above average for downloading ISO's multiple times just to clock my fastest time and figured the party line was correct, most people only use maybe a GB / month, and in many cases they do. Now I start getting into Youtube videos at minimum 480p and 720p also comedy central videos and after about 3 hours of video I'm rounding 1.5GB! If I drop my cable TV subscription and continue to watch Internet video of similar quality to replace it for the same amount of time 5 days a week your looking at 1.5 x 30 = 45GB, still well below many bandwidth caps. Now if you have more than one person in the house with the same tastes even if they are watching the same videos on different displays it multiplies from there. Some people are into Netflix, Hulu, iTunes movies, etc and multiply that by the people in the house hold that are doing the same thing your coming around 60+GB / person/month. In some places 64GB is a common cap and just basic stuff all legit and your cap is blown.

ISP's seem to build for todays standards for the future, which is not right. How can they assume news, social media and email is the only thing many are going to use? TV's already come with internet connectivity as well as pretty much every other electronic device. OnLive and other similar ventures will be eating that cap just to play a few games. The usage is not leveling is it about to explode. So now they fail to meet serious future demands and seem "shocked" when they get saturated? Then they complain that supply and demand will kick in because of the saturation and your connection is now charged at a premium?

Saying X is fast enough for Y is fine since you are commenting on present day usage and you in many cases are correct, the trick is that ISP's are banking on your dumb ass to build the network of tomorrow.