{"id":1596,"date":"2012-01-07T18:44:18","date_gmt":"2012-01-07T22:44:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/?p=1596"},"modified":"2012-01-07T18:44:18","modified_gmt":"2012-01-07T22:44:18","slug":"death-to-data-hogs-ooops-thats-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/2012\/01\/07\/death-to-data-hogs-ooops-thats-us\/","title":{"rendered":"Death to Data Hogs! Ooops, that’s us!"},"content":{"rendered":"

The New York Times<\/em>\u00a0has an article on the concentration of use of mobile airwaves<\/a>. \u00a0It seems that 1% of the users consume half the bandwidth:<\/p>\n

The world\u2019s congested mobile airwaves are being divided in a lopsided manner, with 1 percent of consumers generating half of all traffic. The top 10 percent of users, meanwhile, are consuming 90 percent of wireless bandwidth.<\/p>\n

Arieso, a company in Newbury, England, that advises mobile operators in Europe, the United States and Africa, documented the statistical gap when it tracked 1.1 million customers of a European mobile operator during a 24-hour period in November.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Wow! \u00a0That is amazing! \u00a0Those greedy bandwidth hogs! \u00a0If it wasn’t for that 1%, usage would go down 50%. Get rid of 10% and usage goes down 90%! \u00a0Time to Occupy the Download Link! \u00a0Right?<\/p>\n

Wrong.<\/em> \u00a0As my former student Ben Peterson<\/a> pointed out, measuring usage over a day doesn’t give much of an idea of the daily variability of usage. \u00a0For instance, three days ago I had some time to kill, so I downloaded a video and a few games. \u00a0I then updated all of my apps, and cleaned up my photo collection by sending some pictures to my web photo storage. \u00a0 I was a complete bandwidth hog! \u00a0Since then, I haven’t used my phone much at all. \u00a0So, three days ago, I was part of the 1%; \u00a0since then I haven’t been. \u00a0Which day did you measure me?<\/p>\n

So yes, on a given day, 1% of the people use half the bandwidth. \u00a0But, unlike financial wealth, we get to change around (every day!) who that 1% are.<\/p>\n

If you want to use analytics, you really have to think about what your statistics mean and how you can generalize it. \u00a0 \u00a0The New York Times<\/em> (again!<\/a>), like much of journalism, rarely seems to take the next step and actually think about the numbers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The New York Times\u00a0has an article on the concentration of use of mobile airwaves. \u00a0It seems that 1% of the users consume half the bandwidth: The world\u2019s congested mobile airwaves are being divided in a lopsided manner, with 1 percent of consumers generating half of all traffic. The top 10 percent of users, meanwhile, are … Continue reading “Death to Data Hogs! Ooops, that’s us!”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1596","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-or-in-the-press"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1596","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1596"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1596\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}