US Does Surprisingly Well in Internet Survey

Herman's hermit writes "A new report from the World Economic Forum ranks the US number four when it comes to 'network readiness,' despite the fact that the same report has the US 17th broadband subscribers and 19th in bandwidth. 'While good news overall for the US, which is poised to take full advantage of information technology gains, the report probably won't change many minds when it comes to talking specifically about US broadband deployment.'"

Comments

Re:Large

[Anonymous Coward]

But we've got 50 of them. Maybe it's tougher to wire up the more rural states, but doesn't the lack of clusters of high-quality inexpensive broadband in our urban areas (comparable to, say, the level of service you might find in the Netherlands) suggest more issues than geography comprise the bandwidth problem?

Don't look at the ranking, look at the scores

[EmbeddedJanitor]

There's no statistical difference between the top ten or so (+- 4%) and the top 25 are all within a +- 10% band.

Given that online surveys are notoriously bad and need wide margins of error, I would not read anything into this except for the obvious: First world countries (EU, USA etc) are ahead of Chad, Zimbabwe etc.

Duh!

Re:Large

[tindur]

Does this count as a Slashdot meme already? Every time there is a story on Slashdot about how the net is somehow better somewhere else than in the US the result is "But the US is so big" and then we get "There is a country that is even less densely populated than the US that has better net connections.

Re:Large

[Anonymous Coward]

That might be a believable argument if the denser parts of the U.S. had internet access on par with that of Europe.