It seems that more often the various rankings that compare life style across countries or cities use at least some metric related to the connectedness of their populations. Whether they measure adoption of mobile technology, Internet infrastructure or number of servers hosted, their attempt reflects an important reality of our times: the success of a city or country depends in some measure on the ability by its citizens to participate in the service economy, which is shifting rapidly to the virtual space.
The Washington Post has a comparison of the various levels of broadband access available in various industrialized countries. In Japan’s Warp-Speed Ride to Internet Future, the main argument is Japan’s super fast infrastructure allowing Internet users to enjoy a service 30 times faster than the one available in the United States. While super fast Internet access enables new applications, the total population with such levels of service is also an important factor as only with large number of subscribers there will be incentives to create such applications. I found a more recent version of the statistics cited by The Washington Post in Wikipedia’s List of countries by broadband users:
This article validates the ranking discussed in top digital cities, but challenges the easy assumption that the United States will continue to be at the forefront of the digital revolution. With such high quality infrastructure other countries are giving the citizens a tremendous advantage to compete in the new economy.
The High penetration countries like Denmark and Switzerland should be taken as an example when we talk about the Reach of Broadband .
I think the important factor to look here should be the Broadband population penetration rather than the total number of subscribers . The USA has been at the top of the list for quite a long time . But now countries like China and India are fast catching up . The Growth rate is also an important factor .