St. Cloud Florida Throws Down the Gauntlet. AKA, Show Me the Money! (and Your Numbers).

Originally posted by Esme over at MuniWireless.com. Under the continuing leadership of folks like Jonathan Baltuch, St. Cloud Florida has been a paragon of openness concerning their usage statistics. The challenge I will make is for other (private) providers to make these statistics publicly available so that we can directly compare the pros and cons of various business models. Of particularly importance here are the "take rate" -- over 77% of households are registered to receive services (typical industry take rates are 15-20%) -- thus St. Cloud is a remarkably inclusive digital city. And the bottom line, St. Cloud residents have saved over $3.7 million since inaugurating their free public broadband service.

Meanwhile....

...Detailed statistics on St. Cloud Florida Municipal Wireless:
(1) Total number of registered households: 8,492 (77.2% of the city)
- total number of registered devices: 14,198
- total number of individual users (2): 20,0008

(2) Average number of users per household: 2.09
(3) Average number of devices per household: 1.38
(4) Maximum number of simultaneous users: 2040 (24% of households)
(5) Total number of individual sessions: 1,322,109
(6) Total hours logged on by users: 4,627,381
(7) Total megabits of information transferred: 25,617,918
(this amounts to approximately 410 million web pages)
(8) Ave session length: 3.5 hours

Additional statistics:

(a) From the end of month 1 to the end of month 12, the Megabits of information transferred by users has increased by 470%
(b) Average monthly growth rate of subscribers in year 1: 26.1%
(c) Average monthly fee previously paid per household by residents for Internet access: $36.47
(d) Estimated currently available annual savings to the residents of St. Cloud: $3,724,754

UPDATE: In response to questions about how they calculated the number of registered households, here's the formula:

Total number of devices registered: 14,198
Minus system reset in first month: 1,000
(note: in the first two weeks of operations the registration system was reset and the database of approx 1,000 users was wiped out. It is assumed that they re-registered and would show up twice in the total number

Total number of unique devices registered: 13,198
Minus business users: 805 (6.1% based on user survey data)
Minus visiting users: 674 (4.9% based on user survey data)
Total number of residential devices: 11,719

Total number of registered households: 8,492
(the user survey determined an average of 1.38 devices per household)

This gives the percentage of homes registered (or homes passed) as 77% based on a total of 11,000 homes in St. Cloud.