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.