Contact: Morton O'Kelly, (614) 292-8744
Written by Jeff Grabmeier, (614) 292-8457
[email protected]
STUDY REVEALS MOST INTERNET-ACCESSIBLE CITIES IN UNITED
STATES
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Washington, D.C. is the most Internet-
accessible city in the United States, according to a new
study by Ohio State University researchers.
The other top five cities, in order, are Chicago, Dallas,
New York and Atlanta. (See chart below.)
Researchers measured accessibility by the number of Internet
connections to and from each city through 31 major
commercial-Internet backbones. Cities that had more
connections were rated as more accessible. The combined
network of these 31 backbones -- which included
telecommunications giants such as AT&T and Sprint --
contained 141 cities and 848 linkages.
High-ranking cities in this survey may have some advantages
over other cities in the global marketplace, said Morton
O'Kelly, co-author of the study and professor of geography
at Ohio State University.
"In general, cities with more linkages to the Internet
backbone will have faster access and more reliable
connections to global information," O'Kelly said. "This
enhanced access results in a comparative advantage that will
grow in importance with the continuing global
computerization of information."
O'Kelly did the study with David Wheeler, a former graduate
student at Ohio State. The research focuses solely on the
commercial Internet -- not systems serving primarily
military, research or other institutions. Their results
appear in the current issue of the journal Professional
Geographer.
Overall, cities in the West did best in the rankings. Eight
of the top 20 cities are located in the West, five are in
the Northeast, four are in the Midwest, and three are in the
South.
The West's advantage comes primarily from California cities
in and around Silicon Valley and Los Angeles. "The results
are not unexpected given the growth of computer technology
and investment in the Internet in California over the past
decade," O'Kelly said.
Washington leads the pack in part because it is one of the
nation's four network access points -- locations where
Internet service providers interconnect and exchange data
flow, O'Kelly said. The other NAPs are in San Francisco,
Chicago and New York, which are all in the top 10 of
Internet accessibility.
How do high accessibility rankings favor a city? One major
reason, O'Kelly said, is that cities with high accessibility
often are served by more than one Internet backbone. This
redundancy is important in the event that one backbone
network experiences a technical problem or especially heavy
use. Most of the backbones have peering relationships that
allow each other to share traffic flow, which may be
especially vital when one of the backbones has problems.
In addition to measuring the total linkages each city has to
the Internet backbones, the researchers also used a
different measure: the total distance of the Internet paths
from one city to every other city. In this case, cities
with the shortest total paths had an advantage over cities
with longer paths. While there was some shuffling of
positions, eight of the top 10 cities were the same on both
lists. New York City (Pennsauken, NJ) was ranked first in
this measure. In general, O'Kelly said cities in the
Northeast fared best in having the shortest total Internet
paths to other cities.
O'Kelly emphasized that the data used in this study will
change rapidly. "What we have is a snapshot of city
accessibility at one moment in time from data collected in
1997," he said. "I'm sure many of the results we found will
change relatively quickly."
This study was supported in part by an Ameritech Faculty
Fellowship to O'Kelly.
MOST INTERNET-ACCESSIBLE CITIES
1. Washington
2. Chicago
3. Dallas
4. New York
5. Atlanta
6. San Jose, Calif.
7. Los Angeles
8. Houston
9. San Francisco
10. Phoenix
11. Boston
12. Seattle
13. Philadelphia
14. St. Louis
15. Denver
16. Baltimore
17. Minneapolis
18. Palo Alto, Calif.
19. Detroit
20. Santa Clara, Calif.
Source: Professional Geographer, (51) 3, 1999, p. 336
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Contact: Morton O'Kelly, (614) 292-8744; [email protected]
Written by Jeff Grabmeier, (614) 292-8457;
[email protected]
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