Whirlpool News - It’s finally in: the 2005 survey results

The results of Whirlpool’s 2005 Australian Broadband Survey are finally here!

The survey was conducted over a four week period — from 29 December 2005 to 27 January 2006, during which the survey was successfully completed and verified a total of 16,590 times.

The full report containing all the survey results can be found here.

Some interesting points to come out of the survey:

• Nearly 47% of respondants felt that constantly fast speeds was the most important thing about a connection, while only 0.1% felt that exclusive content from the ISP was of most value. ISPs should take heed of this when planning their next marketing promotions.
• City-wide wireless broadband got less support that I thought it would: 55.7% yes vs 44.3% no. And 58.5% would be willing to pay no more than $20 extra for it (actually, 40.3% said no more than $10 more)
• 34.7% of respondants would like to use VOIP but haven’t yet. Skype’s recent addition of Australian Skype-in numbers may assist in this uptake.
• 84.3% of people are satisfied with the sound quality of their VoIP calls. So much for the telco’s call-quality scare mongering.
• The largest group of respondants were students (14.8%), followed by IT Support & Development (10.8% & 10.3% respectively) and it’s probably safe to assume that a large number of the students are IT students at uni. What this means is that while the data in the report is interesting, it’s not really representative of the general population: 4 of the top 10 groups were IT-based professions (student, Engineering, Government, Trades, Telecommunications & ‘other’ being the rest). These groups constituted 73% of the whole survey base. So really most of the respondants were fairly technical, if not IT staff. None of this invalidates the survey, it’s just something to keep in mind. The counter point is that these 10 groups probably make up the bulk of the people using broadband at the moment.

Eighteen months ago, Naples resident Tony Ierardi opened up a DeLorean remanufacturing operation with the help of Texan Stephen Wynne, who had purchased the rights to the DeLorean name and logo, along with the factory’s leftover parts.

The company is now capable of building a “new” be-winged coupes for $42,500-and of course, they’re happy to remedy the factory-correct DeLorean’s rather sluggish performance for a few dollars more. Ierardi and company are doing so well at the moment that they’ve already got a wait of upwards of 60 days for their versions of John Z’s stainless-steel wonder.

Come on, you know you’ve always wanted one! Truly the definitive car of the 80s. We’ve had a few for sale on Drive in the past, nothing at the moment unfortunately, and I found this one for sale on eBay in the UK

Skype has released a beta of the 2.5 version release. Nifty new features:

• Shared Groups
• SMS sending from Skype (although I imagine it will only be in the US to start with)
• Outlook contact calling from Skype

First thing I noticed though is the installer is a fairbit chunkier. 10.24 vs the old 8.96MB installer. Unfortunately, it’s very beta, and the connection settings don’t allow me to setup for our local proxy server & it doesn’t seem to be detecting the settings from IE like it’s supposed to. Oh well, guess I’ll have to wait for the next beta…

Of course, Gizmo has just released a new version, maybe that’s another option