Re: [nznog] Stats NZ ISP survey

15 Oct 2015

      In my mind the most statistically useful division between residential 
and business might be whether the account is signed up under a personal 
entity, or a registered company/charity/etc.
That'd be a fairly coarse filter; there are of course plenty of 
overlaps, in the home-business market and in the rural sense where 
connections may be aggregated and have multiple uses, etc.

In other news I don't suppose there's anyone from Stats on NZNOG who 
could invite a more structured response to the concerns being raised 
about the validity of the stats?
If ISP's are obliged to take the time to send a return, it seems 
chronically wasteful if the data can't be trusted.

Mark.

On 16/10/2015 4:10 p.m., Stan Rivett wrote:
...
Hi Don
Yes, that's why I asked. I scratch my head over the Business / 
Residential division every time I do the survey. My method of 
categorising it comes down to something like:
IIf( query.company eq '' , "Residential", "Business")
Not, I suspect, a very scientific method ;-)
Cheers
Stan Rivett
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On 16 October 2015 at 15:14, Don Stokes mailto:don(a)daedalus.co.nz> wrote:
The stats come from an annual  ISP survey done by the Department
    of Statistics. Survey returns are compulsory, but the figures are
    self-reports by ISPs using their own interpretations of the
    categories. In most cases, ISPs will report "business users" as
    users of "business" plans, but other divisions may be used.
The individual ISPs are probably in a better position than anyone
    else to report proportions of business vs residential usage, but
    you still need to apply appropriate condiments to the numbers. In
    many cases, an ISP may not know if a customer is operating as a
    business or not. As you observe, many connections are used for
    both residential and business purposes, and I can't imagine any
    ISP putting any serious research into this for the sake of
    answering one question on one annual survey.
There are other questions that may also suffer an element of this
    kind of fuzz. Again, check your sodium intake.
-- don
*snip*

Re: [nznog] Stats NZ ISP survey

Mark Foster