Surprises among most-wired cities list
San Francisco? Sure. But Atlanta and Minneapolis among the USA's
most wired cities?
So says Yahoo! Internet Life magazine. The March issue, on
newsstands next week, will name the 100 top cities in cyberspace,
considering Internet users per capita, the number of networked
computers, registered addresses, Internet backbone traffic and how
many times a city showed up on the big Internet directories.
Some results are surprising. After San Francisco - so wired that a party
doesn't count if you don't get someone's e-mail address - the second most
wired city in America is Atlanta.
Credit the Olympics. The hub of commerce for the South, Atlanta has
four to seven times more fiber optic lines than New York, says Nick
Gold, press secretary to Mayor Bill Campbell. "There was an incredible
amount of infrastructure put into place for the Olympic Games, which
we're benefiting from," Gold says.
A host of major tech businesses, including IBM, MCI, Apple, Lucent
Technologies, BellSouth and Peachtree Software, also use Atlanta as a
base of operations, plus nine colleges and universities, including Georgia
Tech.
Among other less-than-obvious choices:
o Austin, Texas, at fourth thanks to its strong software industry,
wired college set and enough digital culture to make someone
from Silicon Valley feel right at home.
o Minneapolis is sixth, related less to long winters than to a strong
city infrastructure that makes free Net access available at
libraries, as well as a highly educated population, says Mayor
Sharon Sayles Belton. She notes that the ratio of kids to
computers at the secondary school level is 8 to 1.
Oddly, it isn't until eighth place that we come to New York. By brute
number of Internet users (3.5 million), it would win any contest. But the
lightly wired outer boroughs knock it out of the top five.
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