Bad PR karma return to haunt Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore
When the clock strike 00:00 on April 1, 2008, Singapore will suddenly have 1,000,000 less Internet users. Singapore’s IDA will have some explaining to do.
On Mr Wang Says So Blog, Mr Wang highlighted a Straits Times article of IDA inflating figures to make it look that many Singaporeans were connected to the Internet because they had a land line belonging to a leading monopoly telecom in Singapore, Singtel.
From Mr Wang Says So Blog,
Basically all you have to do is make the wild claim that every grandmother, grandfather, uncle and auntie who has a phone in his/her home is also an Internet user.
Alas, the truth eventually emerges, as it usually will. And it’s a rather embarrassing truth.
Mr Wang was referring to this article that appeared in the Straits Times.
From digital.asiaone.com,
THIS is not an early April Fool’s joke. On April 1 next year, close to one million Internet dial-up subscribtions in Singapore could ‘disappear’.
It raises a poser about one set of figures Singapore has used in claiming to be among the world’s most wired cities, although this claim holds, thanks to other criteria and widespread broadband penetration here.
SingTel, which owns most residential phone lines here, ends its free Web access service, available to all these customers, on April 1.
The drop in 1,000,000 users will hurt Singapore Internet rankings.
According to Internet World Stats, as of 2005, Singapore had 2,2421,800 Internet users or 66% of the population.
Minus the 1,000,000 Internet users on April 1, 2007 might see Singapore only having half of the 66% of population who uses the Internet. This also means Singapore will see negative figures in year to year growth.
Using numbers to highlight the strength of a message provides some depth to the numbers, but to have “inflate” them is a dangerous thing to do.
PR tend to “inflate” numbers and it is the job of the tech journalists to question the numbers.
Kudos to the writer, Irene Tham, for noticing the drop and discussing the impact of it will have.
But what is a “subscribtions”?
I choose to be different.
The figure of 1 million users is due to phone infrastructure not signup. If this is taken into consideration for the survey of 2005, then why can’t the same tactic be used in the next survey ? So what is the infrastructure next time ? How about cable infrastructure ? Remember that majority of HDB flats are been wired with cable and can be turned on anytime for internet connection if user choose to pay. So user don’t have have to use cable for internet but IDA can still consider them as user because the infrastructure is there. In the end, the number could be inflated even further than 66% because the way of some creative intepretation at play by IDA. On the whole, it is a smart move by IDA not to include cable infrastructure as a factor initially because it can be reserved for the “rainy day”.
If you think about it, you find it hard to beat such reason afterall the statistic by our media does not need to explain how they achieve the number all along, do they ?
They could only try this stunt because SingTel and IDA are in the same camp.
[…] number games will most likely by IDA in April 2008 when the number of Internet users in Singapore will drop by a cool 1 million users. Then again, the fault has been pointed at Singtel for providing such figures to the […]