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Only One US City Makes "Top Ten Internet Cities Worldwide" List
An anonymous reader writes "A new report today has ranked the Top 10 'Internet Cities' around the globe, based on a set of five criteria: connection speed, availability of citywide WiFi, openness to innovation, support of public data, and security/data privacy. One might expect high-tech cities like San Francisco and Tel Aviv to appear on a list of 'Internet Cities,' but they don't. Indeed, no Middle Eastern cities appear here at all, and — due, largely, to the United States' poor Internet speeds — the only US city to make this ranking is Seattle."
Okay, that may be so, but can we get list of highest telco/cableco profit cities? I bet USA totally rocks that list.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
There are close to 200 countries in the world. The US is mentioned one time in a list of Top Ten and somehow that's not enough? Please. There are at least 190 countries that don't even have ONE city mentioned.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
And I can tell you the Internet connection here sucks..... :) My 4G hotspot is slow and the hotel's connection is slow... Less than 1/4 of what they advertise...
Argh!
All hail the Seattle-Tacoma metroplex!
(Oh wait... I'm in the Native American Nations way out here in Fall City...)
Every trollism an AC posts is prefixed, in my mind, with "A. Coward whined, in a weak and cowardly voice:"
Seattle's connectivity is pretty abysmal, unless you live in the tiny areas of downtown Seattle serviced by CondoInternet.net. Other than that, you're lucky if you can get Comcast (trust me, there are FAR worse ISPs than Comcast).
...which is no longer such an awesome claim to make, especially since now Spokane (2nd largest city nowadays) is bragging about its 100 square block public hotspot.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
I work in Seattle. Here (at UW) our internet is pretty good, as you might expect - but the city as a whole is nothing to write home about. Of course there's a Starbucks on every corner, so perhaps the city scored well based on the availability of that AT&T free wi-fi...
Reading the article, it appears Seattle scored highly based, at least in part, on things they say they plan to do. And I must admit our local guys are very adept at talking a good game. But come on... they just killed the almost stillborn city-wide wifi network! Talking is basically all they're good at!
#DeleteChrome
For example why would LTE be in a criteria for free and fast? Tokyo for example has great mobile coverage and speed, but not a lot of free wifi. Being a tourist having free wifi is better than no access because your phone cannot be used on the network or the cost is prohibitive. Maybe a better breakdown than what is in the article is required, because getting internet access in London is easier than Toyko; although the speed is not as fast.
They list Montreal, and their primary reasons are laughable.
They say Montreal does very well in speedtests because of... OVH. Wait, what? That's a dedicated server and cloud services provider, they have nothing at all to do with consumer broadband in Montreal. Maybe this is a positive for businesses, but it has zero bearing on your average Montrealer. The second reason is the Ile Sans Fil people, who install free wifi access points... except their coverage is non-existent. They've got 260 access points. There are at least that many access points in my apartment building alone; 260 access points in a metro area of nearly 4 million people means that you can wander the city and will probably never see an Ile Sans Fil access point. I've seen them on rare occasions, but never successfully connected to one (I've tried).
Including Montreal in a list of "top internet cities" pretty much invalidates your entire list...
Between the bling capital of the planet (Dubai) and the ubergeek capital of the planet (Israel), there should have been at least one middle eastern city on that list.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
There are more than a few people out there who seem to think that there are two positions one can be in: #1 and utter crap, at least when it comes to the US. So if the US isn't #1 in something, then it is utter crap, a third world shithole, a loser, etc.
In come cases it is the overly zealous "We're #1" America lovers who really do think the US is the best EVAR at everything. They just can't handle second best at anything, ever.
In more cases it is people who like to hate on the US, for whatever various reasons, and thus see it as a way to say "See! Look at how bad the US is! It isn't the best! It sucks!"
It is very silly, but you see it on Slashdot plenty given that the site has a large number of users with poor world awareness and a dislike for the US (most of them being US citizens).
The same shit went on when there was a story about China having the #1 super computer on the Top 500 list, for the moment. Somehow the fact that the US has the the #2, 3, 5, 6, and 8 (half the top 10, in other words) didn't seem to matter. The US wasn't #1, so clearly they fail.
We also have cheap power that's green.
Adapt. The only other choice is fall by the wayside.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Socialist countries heavily subsidize infrastructure at taxpayer expense, but either way, the bills have to be paid. I like my freedom and control over my income, so I don't mind paying going market rates. I realize it's not comparable to $10/mo for gigabit like it might be in stockholm because the other $60 is publically funded.
Tat said, I do believe the infrastructure could be improved, but that other things like rollbacks on data monitoring are more important.
Really?
>hit print button hoping it gives the whole article
>only first page
tmp;dr
Even Cracked only divides up their "top 10" lists into two pages.
--
BMO
Yet another "top 10" list. Can I get a list of the top 10 top 10 lists? Seriously, I'm tired of articles that amount to "someone's list of top 10 X will shock you!"
I'm on Beacon Hill. Our Internet services vary from street to street. It's ludicrous! I'm stuck with a slow provider right now, but a "gigabit" provider is trying to get access one block away.
Why do you think we legalized pot? Your connection might be slow but you cool with it.
You find that many places post these amazing Speedtest scores. There was some ISP in Riga (Latvia) that was showing extremely high results... However when you do some more extensive testing it doesn't seem to bear out. So why is that? Well because they run their own Speedtest server and operate their stuff like a big WAN.
It is not so hard to provide a big link internal to your network. It is a lot harder (meaning more expensive) to provide enough backhaul to make it fast to the majority of the world.
I mean I can truthfully say I have a gig here at work. I can do a Speedtest to show it... to the Speedtest server in our datacenter down the hall. Off campus I still see good connection speeds, but nowhere near a gig, as we have only about a gig of bandwidth for the whole campus.
Most US ISPs don't offer big links to customer houses, but they do tend to keep oversubscription manageable so you usually get around your rated bandwidth. What you find is that places that offer off the charts Internet speeds for cheap prices are doing WAN like setups and there isn't the backhaul to support it.
I find it interesting that support of public data.and security and data privacy are supposed to be part of the criteria they are never mentioned in the ratings.
I work in the Pioneer Square neighborhood (with the dark fiber in the street that I can't get access to) and live in a suburb just north of town. The telco's and cable companies have divided up Seattle's internet access map until it looks like like your viewing a kaleidoscope. It's horrible. That said, I do have a fairly stable 50/10 cable connection at work and a very stable 35/35 fiber connection at home. But those should be a 1g/100m connection at work and a 100m/100m at home for starters. Sure, we have a mayor who pays lip service to connectivity, and we have some fairly robust interconnects here with all of our high tech, manufacturing and universities but lots of other cities have those as well. What we lack is a cohesive plan to provide high speed wired (and I am talking gigabit here) and wireless connectivity to the entire city. We're still all about the public/private partnerships that lack any real impact (tiny pockets of zoom surrounded by slow pockets of doom). If Seattle is the only US city that made this list, then either this report is cracked or more likely, internet access in the USA is indeed in one sad, sad state of affairs.
But I can watch TV shows on Hulu while downloading a Linux distro with Bittorrent. Am I missing something?
I can't. Not even close (unless I limit bittorrent to next to nothing for download speed). It depends on where in the US you're located.
...listed right at the end of this sentence, and is the final word of the entire article so that you have to wait until the very end before you will know that the very city that was listed on the list is almost about to be written in a few more words and it is Seattle.
So no country on the list had more than one city. There's lots of other countries that aren't even on here.
Checks outside. Still raining. Screw it, back to Slashdot.
Have gnu, will travel.
I really don't care what kind of world-wide lists we're first on. We should stop obsessing about what people in Europe or Asia do or think.
One might expect San Francisco to make the list only if one has never lived there. As a tech Mecca its communication infrastructure has been filled to bursting and expanded by any means necessary time and again...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"Altruism is TEH EVIL!" --Motto of neocons everywhere. Or maybe it's Al-Qaeda. I confuse them sometimes.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
You don't have to be "number one!" at everything.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
of a single state in the US, it's definitely a factor on why we're not #1 in some categories besides internet speeds.
There are definitely a few issues. For example, the Amsterdam entry touts T-Mobile's upcoming 4G rollout as a plus for Amsterdam, but neglects to mention that KPN and Vodafone have already rolled out their 4G networks here. T-Mobile is notorious for having the crappiest network.
Being better than something not on the list doesn't automatically make it belong on the list.
We do have a duopoly (3 if, for businesses, you include FibreNoire), but to be fair, it competes pretty well to other north-american cities. Bell now supports fiber-to-the-home in most central borroughs, and Videotron keeps upgrading their network. (although, of course, you should deal with a reseller for a better deal and less dysfunctional tech support) If only Bell operated as a normal company, and not a marketing dystopia...
I have a 30/10 mbps VDSL/fttn connection using Teksavvy, with IPv6 enabled, for around 60$/month including dry-loop, 300 GB/month cap (unlimited during the night).
However, for hosting, while there may be OVH for cloud stuff, we really lack quality alternatives for traditional hosting. There is some offering, but lots of room for improvement.
I also participate in http://www.reseaulibre.ca/ to 1- create our own decentralised user-operated backbone, 2- fun with networking, 3- have an alternative to bell/videotron.
Whenever I hear about free Wifi, the first thing I think of is Cabo Verde. It's a bunch of islands off the coast of Africa, not remotely rich or anything, but every main square in every town has free Wifi that just works, with no fuss whatsoever. It's great. It's brilliant. It makes me wonder why we can't have free Wifi in the city parks in Amsterdam. We do have free wifi in a number of places, but you usually first have to check a checkbox on a webpage before you can actually use it.
Having 1 of them (privacy) automatically set to zero because of the NSA should mean that you don't have any of the top ten, or indeed the top one hundred. The only reason you do is that the NSA spread its tendrils internationally.