Last month, I wrote about one ranking of technology and communications that put the United States at the top of the world. The United Nations has chimed in with its own ranking that places this country further back in the pack at No. 17.
A quick mea culpa: The headline on the first post was “Surprise: America Is No. 1 in Broadband.” As many commenters pointed out, the ranking I was writing about, by Leonard Waverman, the dean of the Haskayne School of Business at the University of Calgary, evaluated a broader range of computing and communications technologies than simply high-speed Internet access.
In my earlier post, I don’t think my tongue was clearly enough in my cheek when I boasted that the United States was No. 1 (Woo Hoo!). Look at these two studies, with similar goals, and vastly different results. The problem is what they are trying to do just doesn’t make sense. Any methodology that takes a bunch of vaguely related and inconsistently measured indicators, multiplies them by arbitrary weighting factors and adding them up produces rankings filled with far more assumptions and statistical noise than real insight.
The study by the U.N.’s International Telecommunications Union uses the same sort of broad approach, looking at access to communications services (wired and wireless) in each country, the extent technology is used and the technological skills of their residents. It didn’t differentiate between faster and slower broadband service. It said Sweden is No. 1, followed by South Korea, Denmark, the Netherlands and Iceland.
This study differs from Mr. Waverman’s in two fundamental area. The I.T.U. is looking only at home users, while Mr. Waverman also considered business use of technology. And while Mr. Waverman did not try to use the same scale to compare developed and developing countries, the I.T.U. does and so it found indicators that it can find for 145 nations. So as a proxy for computer skills, the agency simply looks at factors like high school enrollment and literacy rates. Yes, if you can’t read, you’re probably not going on the Web, but it doesn’t really seem to help tell how many high-school graduates actually have learned how to operate a computer.
(There are lots of interesting facts in the 108-page report, most notably about the astounding spread of mobile phones. In 2002, there were about 1 billion cellphone lines in the world and about the same number of land lines. Six years later, the number of mobile lines is now 4 billion, representing 60 percent of the world’s population. That’s got to have big and unknowable effects in the coming years.)
I wrote the earlier post because many people are too quick to say that the United States is somehow woefully backwards in broadband. Sure, there are some countries with connections that are cheaper, faster or more widely available than here. But the infrastructure here is also better than much of the media and blog coverage would indicate. I’ve been diving into the differences between the broadband technology and policy in various countries.
Even now, while the United States doesn’t have the sort of price controls and competitive rules that exist in some countries, the consumer may not be entirely as bad off as some may think. The I.T.U. study compared the combined cost of wired telephone, mobile phone service and Internet access with the average income in the countries it studied. By that measure the United States had the second cheapest communications services after Singapore.
If that doesn’t make sense to you, as you write that $200 check to AT&T or Comcast, just wait. Another study will come out shortly that will prove you are being gouged.
Comments are no longer being accepted.