## Australian ISP Market Share, March 2012

Back in 2010 I had a go at estimating the relative market shares of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in Australia. A reader has asked if I have more recent data, so I thought it was high time I revisited these estimates.

I’ve applied the same method as last time: Roy Morgan make ISP customer profiles available for purchase. At the bottom of each report’s synopsis, you’ll see that a sample size has been included (for example, the Internode customer profile is based on a sample of 404 customers).  Now, combining these sample sizes from the ISPs’ profiles I think could potentially provide a good basis for estimating overall market share.

My results are presented in Table 1 below. Market share is ALL business, government and home subscribers with ANY kind of internet access including dialup, DSL, cable, fibre, satellite and wireless (fixed & mobile).

The Roy Morgan samples behind these estimates were taken between April 2011 and March 2012 — except where marked with an asterix. Marked samples were taken between April 2010 and March 2012 (i.e. over two years instead of one), so please regard estimates based on these data with extra caution. Market share in these cases could actually be much smaller than calculated here.

Several ISPs listed individually in Table 1 are actually subsidiaries  of larger groups, particularly the iiNet group. As a group, iiNet now has a combined market share of 13.2%. Please refer to the notes under the table for more details.

Table 1: Estimated Australian ISP market share, March 2012

Internet Service Provider Roy Morgan
sample size (no.)
Estimated relative
market share (%)
3 Internet 243 1.8%
AAPT 255 1.9%
Chariot 135 * 1.0% *
Dodo 348 2.6%
Exetel 119 0.9%
iiNet 660 4.9%
Internode 404 3.0%
iPrimus 237 1.8%
Netspace 164 1.2%
Optusnet 2,367 17.6%
TADAust Connect 144 * 1.1% *
Telstra Bigpond 6,607 49.2%
TPG 749 5.6%
Unwired 111 * 0.8% *
Virgin 163 1.2%
Vodafone 252 1.9%
Westnet 297 2.2%
TOTAL 13,440 100.0%

* Treat these data/estimates with extra caution. Time period for these samples are two years, April 2010 – March 2012. All other time periods are one year, April 2011 – March 2012.

Important notes:

1. AAPT, Netspace, Westnet, and Internode owned by iiNet. Estimated market share for whole iiNet group = 13.2%.
2. Adam Internet serves South Australia and Northern Territory only. Also, Adam are in the process of being acquired by Telstra (at time of writing).
3. Chariot is owned by TPG.

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## Lucky 8?

My state government’s lottery administration, SA Lotteries, makes the results from its various games available online, including tables of how frequently the various lottery numbers were drawn.

For example, you can see here how frequently the numbers 1 through 45 have been drawn in the Saturday X Lotto. At the time of writing this, Number 8 was the most frequently drawn, recorded as occurring a total of 289 times between Draw Number 351 to 3265. Note that the Saturday X Lotto Draws are odd-numbered, so Draw 351 to 3265 actually consists of 1458 (i.e. (3265-351)/2+1) weekly games.

Of course there will be random variation in how frequently balls are drawn over time, just as there’s random variation in heads and tails in the toss of a coin. But is it particularly unusual for the Number 8 Ball being drawn 289 times in 1458 games of Saturday X Lotto?

Is South Australia’s Saturday X Lotto biased towards the number 8?

Now before we can determine if the Number 8 being drawn 289 times in 1458 games of X Lotto is an extraordinary event, it helps if we first work out how many times we expected it to happen. In X Lotto, a total of eight balls (6 balls for the main prize and then 2 supplementary balls) are selected without replacement from a spinning barrel of 45 balls. The probability of any single number of interest being selected in eight attempts without replacement from a pool of 45 can be calculated using a Hypergeometric Calculator as P(X=1)=0.17778 (i.e. just under 18%). Therefore we expect the Number 8 (or any other number for that matter) to be drawn 0.17778 x 1458 = 259 times in 1458 games.

So observing 289 occurrences when we were only expecting 259 certainly seems unusual, but is it extraordinary?

To answer this, I’ll employ the Binomial test to evaluate the null hypothesis, H0:

H0: Observed frequency of the Number 8 being drawn in SA Lotteries’ Saturday X Lotto is within the expected limits attributable to chance (i.e. the lotto is a fair draw)

vs. the alternative hypothesis, H1:

H1: Observed frequency is higher than would be expected from chance alone (i.e. the lotto is not a fair draw)

The statistics package, R, can be used to run the Binomial test:

> binom.test(289,1458,0.17778,alternative=”greater”)

> Exact binomial test
> data: 289 and 1458
> number of successes = 289, number of trials = 1458, p-value = 0.02353
> alternative hypothesis: true probability of success is greater than 0.17778

So we can reject the null hypothesis of a fair draw at the alpha=0.05 level of significance.  The p-value is small enough to conclude that the true probability of Number 8 being drawn is higher than expected based on chance alone.

However, please note that I am definitely not suggesting that anything untoward is going on at SA Lotteries, or that you’ll improve the odds of winning the lottery by including the number 8 in your selection. For a start, rejection of the null hypothesis of a fair system occurs at the standard, but fairly conservative, alpha=0.05 level. What if I had decided to use alpha=0.01 instead? The null hypothesis of a fair system would be retained. Things are all rather arbitrary in the world of statistics.

Still, a curious result that utilised several statistical concepts that I thought would be interesting to blog about.

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## Which Australian State Is the Most Charitable?

The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) recently released Taxation Statistics 2009-10, a broad collection of data compiled from income tax returns for that financial year. If taxation statistics are the kind of thing that gets your juices flowing then check it out – the report and associated tables contain a veritable wealth of information.

Amongst other things, it shows deductions claimed by taxpayers for gifts or donations to charities — including welfare agencies, hospitals, research institutes, environmental groups, and arts organisations. From these data I thought it might be interesting to see which of the Australian States and Territories is the most relatively charitable — using tax deductions claimed as a proxy for actual donations made.

I used the Selected items, by sex and State/Territory of residence, 2009-10 income year data to compare taxpayers’ deductions claimed for gifts or donations to charities, relative to their total incomes. The average income per taxable individual in Australia was $66,502 per annum in 2009-10, of which an average$216 (proportionally, 0.32% of income) was claimed for charity. The States and Territories are summarised in Table 1 below.

Table 1: Charity as a proportion of income, States & Territories, 2009-10

The data in the table are graphed below. The red horizontal line is the Australian average against which we can compare the individual States and Territories.

Figure 1: Charity as a proportion of income, States & Territories, 2009-10

New South Welshpersons and Australian Capital Territorians really pull their weight when it comes to donating to charity. They have some of the highest average individual incomes in the country ($69,431 p.a. and$72,007 p.a., respectively), but then really come to the party with the highest proportion of that income going to charitable organisations (0.40% or $277, and 0.39% or$279, respectively).

Western Australians on the other hand really need to lift their game. Despite an average annual individual income of $71,690 (second highest in the country), they were only half as charitable as their eastern cousins mentioned above — only 0.22% ($161) of their income went to charity in the 2009-10 financial year. The Northern Territory recorded the lowest proportion of income to charity with 0.19% of $64,527 ($124) claimed as gifts and donations.

Or perhaps they actually gave a lot to charity, but then didn’t claim it as a deduction come tax-time. Statistics can be a bit dodgy like that.

Interesting.

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## Queuing Theory and iiNet, Part II

It’s an interesting read, but the author makes a lot of basic errors. Unfortunately, customers refuse to line up and call at regular intervals and spend the average amount of time on the call. The reality is obviously more bursty than that and needs non-linear modelling.

The feedback from Michael Malone above was in response to my previous blog post on Applying Queuing Theory to iiNet Call Centre Data. I don’t accept that I made “a lot of basic errors”, but I did make a lot of assumptions. Or perhaps the statistician George E. P. Box said it better, “Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful.”

But Michael is correct – customers don’t line up and call at regular intervals, and the reality is more “bursty” (i.e. Poisson). My model is inadequate because it doesn’t take into account all the natural variation in the system.

One way of dealing with, or incorporating, this random variation into the model is by applying Monte Carlo methods.

Take the iiNet Support Phone Call Waiting Statistics for 6 February 2012, specifically for the hour 11am to noon. I chose this time block because the values are relatively easy to read off the graph’s scale – (a bit over) 664 calls and an average time in the queue of 24 minutes.

Now if we assume Average Handling Time (AHT), including time on the call itself followed by off-phone wrap-up  time, was 12 minutes, then my model says there were 664*(12/60) / (24/60 +1) = 95 iiNet Customer Service Officers (CSOs) actually taking support calls between 11am and noon on 6 February 2012. That’s an estimate of average number of CSOs actually on the phones and taking calls during that hour, excluding those on a break, performing other tasks, and so on. Just those handling calls.

But there will be a lot of variation in conditions amongst those 664 calls. I constructed a little Monte Carlo simulation and ran 20,000 iterations of the model with random variation in call arrival rates, AHT, and queue wait times.

Assumptions:

Little’s Law applies
Average time in the queue of 24 minutes
AHT (time on the actual call itself plus off-call wrap-up) of 12 minutes

then the result of the 20,000 monte carlo runs is a new estimate of 135 iiNet CSOs taking support calls between 11am and noon on 6 February 2012.

I ran a few more simulations, plugging in different values for number of CSOs handling calls (all else remaining equal – i.e. 664 calls an hour; AHT=12 minutes) to see what it did for average time in the queue. The results are summarised in the table below:

Modelling suggests that if iiNet wanted to bring the average time in the phone call support queue down to a sub-5 minute level during that particular hour of interest, an additional 85% in active phone support resourcing would need to be applied.

The table of results is graphically presented below (y-axis is time in queue, x-axis is CSOs)

Looks nice and non-linear to me 🙂 You can see a law of diminishing returns thing start to take place around about the point of the graph corresponding to 160 CSOs / 16.5 minute average queue wait time.

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## Applying Queuing Theory to iiNet Call Centre Data

In previous posts I’ve talked about queuing theory, and the application of Little’s Law in particular, to Internet Service Provider (ISP) customer support call centre wait times. We can define Little’s Law, as it applies to a call centre, as:

The long-term average number of support staff (N) in a stable system is equal to the total number of customers in the queue (Q) multiplied by the average time support staff spend resolving a customers’ technical problems (T), divided by the total time waited in the queue (W); or expressed algebraically: N=QT/W.

Thinking things through a bit more, the total number of customers in the queue (Q) at a point in time in a stable system should be equal to the rate at which people joined the queue (λ), minus the rate at which the support desk dealt with technical problems (i.e. N/T) over the period of observation. Obviously Q>=0.

So N=QT/W and Q=λ-N/T which all comes out in the wash as:

N=λT/(W+1)

I thought might be a bit of fun to see if this could be applied to the customer support call centre waiting statistics published by one of Australia’s largest ISPs, iiNet.

iiNet make some support centre data available via their customer toolbox page. Below is a screenshot of call activity and wait times graphed each hour by iiNet on 10 January 2012. The green line (in conjunction with the scale on the left hand side of the graph) represents the average time (in minutes) it took to speak to a customer service representative (CSR), including call-backs. The grey bars (in conjunction with the right hand scale) represents the total number of incoming phone calls to iiNet’s support desk.

It may be possible to use the formula derived above to estimate how many CSRs iiNet had on the support desk handling calls that day. For example, during the observed peak period of 8am to 1pm on Tuesday, 10 January 2012, the iiNet support desk was getting around 732 calls per hour on average. The expected wait time in the queue over the same period was around 11 minutes.

If we assume that the average time taken for a CSR to resolve a technical problem is, let’s say, 12.5 minutes, then we can estimate that the number of CSRs answering calls in a typical peak-hour between 8am to 1pm on 10 January 2012 as:

732*(12.5/60) / (11/60 + 1)

= 129 CSRs actively handling calls.

Sounds sort of a reasonable for a customer service-focussed ISP the size of iiNet. But if iiNet wanted to bring the average time in the queue down even more – to a more reasonable 3 minutes, for example – they’d need 145 CSRs (all else remaining equal) during a typical peak-hour answering calls.

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## Has the Australian Stock Market…

… ever seen anything quite like this?

I updated my “Stock Market Seismometer” (click on the separate tab above for details) for the first time in many months. I have to say, the results shocked me. Over the course of 2011 the Australian stock market slid down even further into “oversold” territory. As we head into 2012 things have never looked so bleak. Or maybe 2012 will be the year of the rebound? I expect at some point growth will move back to its long term trend, but when that will start to happen is anyone’s guess.

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## How poker machines vacuum up your money

Poker machines are unique in the gambling world. They are the only form of gambling that has been designed and crafted for the purpose of making money, and where there is absolutely no chance of influencing the outcome.

The article, linked above, on poker machines is an excellent insight into the mathematics of poker machine gaming and how, despite a guaranteed return-to-player percentage which is high, a punter that plays long enough ends up with nothing. The vital point that Tom Cummings makes is this:

It’s common knowledge that poker machines have a return-to-player percentage of anywhere between 85 per cent and 90 per cent, depending on where you live and what kind of establishment you’re playing in. For the sake of the story, let’s assume that Gladys’ poker machine was set to 90 per cent. That means that over a long period of time, the machine will return 90 per cent of money gambled to players, and keep 10 per cent as profit.

But wait, I hear you cry. Gladys didn’t lose 10 per cent; she lost it all! Well, no… not according to poker machine mathematics. The rule is that the poker machine has to return 90 per cent of money gambled… not money inserted. And there’s a huge difference.

The way it works, mathematically, is, I think, very interesting. Take the example used in the article of a 2-cent gaming machine, at $1 per play, with guaranteed return of 90%. When you load that dollar in the slot, sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose, but the long-term average dictates that at each “turn” the dollar is losing 10% of its value.$1 turns into 90c, turns into 81c, turns into 72.9c, … , turns into 2c at which point the game ends.

More generally, at “turn” n, an amount A1 initially fed into a slot machine with return R is worth:

$A_{n}=A_{1}R^{n-1}$

or solving for n:

$n=\frac{\displaystyle ln(A_{n}) - ln(A_{1})}{\displaystyle ln(R)} + 1$

What does this mean? It means that it takes, on average

n = [ ln(0.02) – ln(1.00) / ln(0.90) ] + 1 = 38

iterations to turn $1.00 into 2 cents on a 90% return poker machine. More importantly, the total amount gambled isn’t$1.00, it’s actually (because you’re re-investing your winnings and following your losses until the game ends): $1.00 + 90c + 81c + 72.9c + … + 2c. Or more generally, $A_{1}\sum_{1}^{n} R^{i-1}$ which you’ll remember converges to: $A_{1} \frac{\displaystyle 1-R^{n-1}}{\displaystyle 1-R}$ So a single dollar coin will generate, on average (on a 2-cent, 90% return machine): [ 1-0.9(38-1)] / [ 1-0.90 ] =$9.80 in total bets.

At $1.00 per game, at 10 games per minute, that’s about 1 minute of play for every dollar put in, or 5 hours to burn through Gladys’$300.

Those who defend poker machines often point to the high rate of return as one of the reasons that pokies are just “good, clean fun” for most people. The reality is that every poker machine can meet this “rate of return” requirement while still leaving the gambler broke. That’s poker machine mathematics.

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