The Utility Consumers’ Action Network (UCAN) makes idiots of themselves in their use of math. It’s a case of mean vs. median. As an example…
It reminds me of the (probably apocryphal) story about the geography department at the University of North Carolina, which in 1986 supposedly reported that the average starting salary of its graduates that year was $300,000 — without explaining that there were only six graduates that year, and one of them was Michael Jordan. Anyone who understands math knows that the average (know in math speak as the mean) is almost always not the most illustrative way to look at a range of numbers. Instead, it is the median, or the middle number in a list of numbers, the point at which half the numbers are higher and half are lower.
The overall cost per minute for ALL users is…
Even with the unrepresentative sample group, in the simplest, Occam’s razor sense of the word, the $3.02 claim is wrong. Of those 115 bills, per page 44-46 of the report, the average monthly bill is $56.87 for an average use of 193 minutes.
$56.87 / 193 minutes = 29.4663212 cents per minute
Now that doesn’t tell the whole story as it’s quite true, as in the example above, some people pay a lot of money because they use their phone very little.
One would think that the members of UCAN would have the intelligence to believe that publishing a report like this makes them look like total incompetent fools. Considering the math competency in the United States, that’s not likely. UCAN should be laughed out of town, the state, the country and the internet for publishing such trash.
