[Sigia-l] Question about International Connections to the Net

[Anders Ramsay]

This terminology will likely be more easily understood by people with a
technical background, so your results will likely be skewed toward
technically proficient users (which I think would be more likely to have
faster connection speeds.)  I would recommend accompanying these technical
terms with a description of the term(s) and, more importantly, an
explanation of how the user might be able to determine what their connection
speed *in a language selected by the user* (i.e. maybe have the user select
a language at the start of the survey.) Or you could also include a
functionality (such as a pinging applet) that the user could engage to see
their current connection speed, and perhaps also include that information in
your survey results (stated connection speed vs actual connection speed)

On the other hand, are you interested in connection speed or type of
connection?  By asking for type of connection (eg DSL or Cable) when you
really want to know how fast the connection is, that might skew your results
as well, since there are so many flavors of DSL with different up/down
speeds, Cable/ISDN connections can be affected by activities of other users,
people who think they have T1 may in fact be on a shared T1 and so forth.  I
would consider sticking with just numeric values rather than connection
types.

-Anders

On 7/15/02 6:06 PM, Peter Merholz at peterme at peterme.com wrote:

> SIGIA Folks--
> 
> I'm working on the construction of a survey that will be given to folks
> around the globe.
> 
> We want to ask a question about connection speed (we know it varies widely
> from country to country).
> 
> Would this set of answers be meaningful to folks outside the US and Canada?
> 
> ===
> ·  28.8Kbps modem
> ·  56Kbps modem
> ·  ISDN (128K)
> ·  DSL (128K+)
> ·  Cable modem
> ·  T1 or higher
> ·  Other (specify): _________
> ·  Don't know
> ===
> 
> Are terms like "ISDN", "DSL", "Cable Modem", and "T1" valid? Are modem
> speeds the same? I'm guessing they are, but don't want to presume...
> 
> --peter
> 
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