CTIA defended earlier reporting of data from its semi-annual survey, in...
CTIA defended earlier reporting of data from its semi-annual survey, in a blog post Monday by Robert Roche, longtime head of the association’s Research Department. Tim Farrar, president of Telecom, Media and Finance Associates, questioned in a recent article on…
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the “GigaOm” website CTIA’s use of numbers. Farrar contended that looking more closely at the data raises real questions about whether there is a spectrum crunch. “The CTIA press release only quotes total wireless data traffic within the US during the previous 12 months up to June 2012 for a total of 1.16 trillion megabytes, but doesn’t give statistics for data traffic in each individual six-month period,” Farrar wrote (http://xrl.us/bnvh4j). “That information, however, can be calculated from previous press releases (which show total traffic in the first six months of 2012 was 635 billion MB, compared to 525 billion MB in the final six months of 2011). Counter to the CTIA’s spin, this represents growth of just 21 percent, a dramatic slowdown from the 54 percent growth in total traffic seen between the first and second half of 2011.” Roche wrote that he was upset at implications CTIA had doctored data to clarify that a spectrum shortage remains a real concern. “Forgive me as this may be a heated blog post since some people have chosen to suggest that I am ‘hiding’ information, which is categorically false and disingenuous. It’s also offensive,” Roche said (http://xrl.us/bnvh4w). “In the press release and on our website, we did change how we reported the MB of data, but only to make it parallel to how we reported the other traffic measures, not as six-month but as twelve-month volumes. In that, we followed the model of our April 2012 press release, where we reported annual (twelve-month) figures on traffic. ... There was no intent to conceal anything."