The article I selected for this discussion is “ The Top 2018 vs. 2017 Fastest UK Mobile and Home Broadband ISPs .” ISPreview published this article on December 27, 2018, to compare the average download speeds as well as the upload speeds between the mobile operators and the national fixed-line broadband ISPs in 2017 and 2018. Associated take-up by consumers and faster connectivity technologies are the two main factors that would most likely affect service speeds, and they made the basis of this comparison.
The instance where the mean is used in the article is calculating the average download speed and upload speed of the leading ten national providers. Notably, the average download and upload speed in 2018 was 34.99Mbps and 7.99Mbps respectively. In 2017, the average download and upload speeds were 28.78Mbps and 6.15Mbps respectively ("The Top 2018 vs 2017 Fastest UK Mobile and Home Broadband ISPs - ISPreview UK", 2019). The mean in this instance was used correctly in comparing the performance trends of all the national providers from 2017 to 2018. It could be seen from the means that the average download and upload speeds moved up from 2017 to 2018, implying improved performance. The use of the mean is appropriate because all the providers are compared in the same platform of performance and the sizes of the ISP do not have an impact on the results.
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However, the mean is inappropriately used when comparing the individual performance. Using the average download speeds, Virgin Media is said to be the fasted national operator but weak in upload speeds due to the small average of the same. Also, according to the article, AAISP recorded the largest increase in speed from 2017 to 2018, when the average speeds are compared with other operators. These cases illustrate the inappropriate use of the mean because the comparison is made while ignoring the sizes of the ISP. The mean of the speeds for AAISP could have possibly been high because it was the smallest ISP. Therefore, using the mean gave a wrong view of speeds increase by individual ISPs since there could be a larger speed increase recorded by the largest ISP, except that the mean turned out to be small since the size is significantly large (mean=total speed/total size). The bigger the total size, the smaller the mean.
References
The Top 2018 vs 2017 Fastest UK Mobile and Home Broadband ISPs - ISPreview UK. (2019). Retrieved from https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2018/12/the-top-2018-vs-2017- fastest-uk-mobile-and-home-broadband-isps.html
