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

[MichaelSmith]

I think the main point in broadband that people just don't get is that the US is huge while many smaller countries are the size of one of the US's states, its is expensive to get broadband.

Here in Australia with one tenth the population density the situation is almost exactly the same as in the USA. That doesn't sound right to me. I think the service should be better in the US.

Re:Large

[electrictroy]

>>>"The US does not have a low population density"

Oh really? I challenge you to drive from NYC to California on I-80, and then repeat that statement. You won't be able to, because then you'll come to realize what I have realized from my cross-country journeys:

- The U.S. is one large cornfield, sprinkled with a few cities here and there.

Pretty much dead wrong there.

[ZombieRoboNinja]

Here's a global population density map: http://soils.usda.gov/use/worldsoils/mapindex/popden.html

Notice how the EU is all dark orange, except for parts of central Spain. Lots of people, more financial incentive to wire everything.

Notice how 80% of Canada is completely deserted, because it's too far north to be habitable. The Northern Yukon does an awful lot to decrease Canada's average population density, but since there's NOBODY there it doesn't affect the difficulty of wiring up broadband. Australia, same thing, except it's like 95% instead of 80% empty.

China is enough of a mix that it might make sense to compare to the US, but I'm guessing there are enough other issues with development, etc. to make it a tough comparison.

Re:Pretty much dead wrong there.

[MadnessASAP]

Ahem... It's not that its too far north to be habitable, It's that when you only have 30 million people it's kind of hard to fill up that much space. You can take any Canadian and stick him up there with nothing but a teabag and a pair of underwear and he'll be happy as fleas on a dog, we just like to be able to hang out with each other.