Monday, July 21, 2008

re iPhone "excessive data charges"

Working as a data miner for an Australian telco (I'll try not to pick sides :) I know that Optus have designed plans that will easily cover the iPhone data usage requirements for the majority of customers.

I agree with the ACCC that there is definately a possibility this could happen, but at least one telco (the one I work for) is behaving itself and offering generous plans with free data for the first few months to avoid any possibility of bill shock. I don't know where the ACCC get their info, but I doubt many of our customers will have 'bill shock'.

See;
"ACCC warns about iPhone bill costs, additional charges"
and also;
"ACCC warns 'iPhoners' on bill shock"

Before we launched the iPhone (last weekend) I did some analysis examining early adopters of the 'old' 2G iPhone. A simple graph showing data usage of existing iPhone users gave us a rough idea of what the new 3G iPhone might require (assuming the new 3G iPhone and customers behave the same way...). The data was roughly something like this;
















A proprtionally large number of early iPhone adopters were using 100mb or less a month, but small percentages of customers would use far more (actually going up to a few gb's).

Based off of this early analysis I'm guessing that the data included in the Optus iPhone plans should be sufficent for most new users of the 3G iPhone. We'll see...

Thursday, July 17, 2008

I finally started a blog...

I try to contribute to data mining related forums and blogs, but never got around to writing my own blog...until now!

Since most of my work revolves around data mining (and using Clementine) that will be the focus of my posts, but other topics might creep in.

It'll be difficult to discuss my work freely because of intellectual property concerns, but I'll try to discuss the data mining problems we face and how we solve them. My intention will be to foster peer review and feedback from other data miners, especially anyone also tackling analysis within terabyte sized data warehouses.

Stay tuned, more to follow.

Tim