 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Internet Service Newsletter No 8. George Skarbek gskarbek@melbpc.org.au |
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I am proud to say that during the recent power restrictions, which included
computer usage bans, you were all excellent! The compliance was way above all expectations. The graphs show
that before 7.00 pm almost nobody dialed in and then the modem banks started to fill as people turned on the
computers right on 7.00 pm when the restrictions were lifted. Note that the graph is just for one
representative bank of modems. The vertical axis are the number of users connected and the horizontal axis is
the time in a 24-hour format which is read from left to right.
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I sent this graph to the editor of the IT Age with a short covering letter and he decided to run this story in The Age. I did an interview during the weekend after the restrictions were lifted and the article was due to appear on Monday. However, as luck would have it, a few major news events filled the paper and that article never had a chance to appear.
Nevertheless, may I reiterate my thanks to all of you on behalf of the Internet team. It is great to be a part of a club with such a sense of community.
In other news, recently I attended a seminar for ISPs with Stan Johnstone and John Morris. One interesting point that was made that on average the ISPs have a 'churn' rate of 25% per quarter. This means that 25% of users change their ISP every three months. However, to put the industry figure into perspective, the single biggest reason given is the using up of free hours. Our rate is about 15% per annum or close to 10 times better than the average. This is a gratifying result for your hard working Internet team.
Reprinted from the April 2000 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
