AP News, January 30th, 2008
Americans may look with envy on the super-fast Internet connections available in South Korea, Japan and parts of Europe, but they can take consolation from a new study that concludes that the U.S. makes better overall use of its telecommunications.
The U.S. ranks No. 1 in a study published Wednesday led by Professor Leonard Waverman at the London Business School that compared 16 developed countries not just by the quality of their communications infrastructure but also how consumers, business and government use it.
By contrast, the U.S. ranked 15th in percentage of homes that have broadband in the latest survey of the 30 nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
On Waverman's "Connectivity Scorecard," the U.S. stood out for good use of telecommunications by businesses. Close behind are Sweden and Japan. But the survey found that much more could be done, even in the most developed countries, to take advantage of existing technologies.
"For example, some mobile banking services and electronic transaction services are better developed in African countries than in the U.S. or Canada," according to the report.
The study was commissioned by Nokia Siemens Networks, a joint venture of Nokia Corp. and Siemens AG that makes telecommunications equipment.
Like the Waverman study, the research unit of Britain's The Economist magazine compiles yearly "e-readiness" rankings that assess telecommunications usage in addition to infrastructure quality.
Supporting Waverman's conclusions, the magazine's 2007 rankings put the U.S. in second place for the third year in a row, beaten only by Denmark, which Waverman did not look at.
