Enex Testlabs is confident the findings of its report on the Federal Government’s controversial ISP filtering scheme will silence the trial’s critics.

Principal at Enex Testlab, Matt Tett, said he wished more ISPs were a part of the trial, but only because it would have silenced critics.

“The ISPs that were the most vocal against it should’ve been the ones that engaged it the most from our perspective,” he said. “It was good, at the end of the day we’re happy with what we’ve done.

“If there was a failure in the testing or if there were not enough participants or something like that, then we’d say ‘okay we can have a confidence factor of zero’, which means we’re not happy with the tests. If there were issues or wide-ranging issues, then we’d go back to re-test.”

Having more users or ISPs would not have made a difference to the veracity of the trials because they were non-heuristic and blocked a set list of restricted URLs, Tett said.

“Given the technology we tested, it wouldn’t have made any difference. The technologies that were participating in the trials from a filtering perspective wouldn’t have made any difference really,” he claimed.

“The [Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy] has been very flexible, and wanted to make sure it was as accurate as possible. We’ve gone back to them on a number of occasions with different suggestions and they’ve come to us as well with suggestions they’ve received and queried us on it and it’s been evaluated and even incorporated and put into the test.”

Tett’s comments come after statistics experts labelled the use of an opt-in method of selecting sample users as unscientific.

The Enex principal compared public comments about the testing methodology to those made when the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) trials were being completed and remained confident the Australian public would respect the trial results when they were released by the Government.

“It’ll be funny once it’s over, it’s just like the ACMA thing, just a storm in a teacup - maybe not the politics or the ethics but the actual testing,” he said.