Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
It took a fair bit of searching, but according to them, 'network readiness' means: the presence of an ICT-friendly and conducive environment, by looking at a number of features of the broad business environment, some regulatory aspects, and the soft and hard infrastructure for ICT; the level of ICT readiness and preparation to use ICT of the three main national stakeholders--individuals, the business sector, and the government; and the actual use of ICT by the above three stakeholders.
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?
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!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
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.
That might be a believable argument if the denser parts of the U.S. had internet access on par with that of Europe.
>>>"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.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
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.