aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Thursday, August 31, 2006
America’s most wired city - Atlanta!
With most of the U.S. technology industry focused on the East and West coasts, you’d think the best place to get online would be San Francisco, or perhaps New York City. But Atlanta tops Forbes.com’s survey of America’s most wired cities.
While Georgia may be best known for hot weather, college football and peaches, Atlanta is no slouch when it comes to technology and the Internet. Home to telecommunications and Internet service providers BellSouth and EarthLink, as well as Cox Communications, the third-largest U.S. cable company, Atlanta beat several cities more closely associated with the Web, like San Francisco, Seattle and New York.
Our rankings factored in the percentage of Internet users with high-speed access, the range of service providers within a city and the availability of public wireless hot spots. Of the 30 cities we measured, Atlanta ranks highest in broadband access options, third in Wi-Fi access points and ninth in broadband adoption: In June, more than 80% of the city’s home Internet users accessed the Web via a high-speed connection.
Via Susan Crawford, “Don’t have Culver City access—that’s your challenge. Southern hospitality means (or should mean) an open, non-discriminatory, unfiltered network.” Given the mood here in Georgia these days, I’m not optimistic.
LATER, Om says:
[W]e checked with WiFi directory service, JiWire and found that San Francisco is the most “unwired” city and has 805 hotspots, including 375 free ones. New York is #2 with 669 hotspots, followed by Chicago with 551. Atlanta ranked at #8 with 372 hotspots, 94 of them free.
