Posted by Gary Audin, Delphi, Inc. | Apr 14, 2008

The "Global Information Technology Report 2007-2008” has just been published by The World Economic Forum (WEF). The U.S. ranks 4th, in a tie with Singapore, behind Denmark, Sweden and Switzerland in the report’s [Internet] Networked Readiness Index (NRI). That is up from 7th place in the previous report. Does this mean that the U.S. internet is up to supporting significant Unified Communications traffic? Not necessarily?

The Index uses 68 variables to assess a country’s technology infrastructure, government regulation, political conditions and market factors. The following list provides the ranking of the top 10 country ratings, with their scores.

1. Denmark--5.78
2. Sweden--5.72
3. http://www.weforum.org/pdf/gitr/2008/Switzerland.pdf--5.53
4. U.S.--5.49
4. Singapore--5.49
6. Finland--5.47
7. Netherlands--5.44
7. Iceland--5.44
9. South Korea--5.43
10. Norway--5.38

The WEF site discusses the report with “the theme [of] Fostering Innovation through Networked Readiness. This year’s Report places a particular focus on the role of networked readiness in spurring innovation. Published for the seventh consecutive year with record coverage of 127 economies worldwide, the Report has become the world’s most comprehensive and authoritative international assessment of the impact of ICT [Information and Communications Technology] on the development process and the competitiveness of nations.”

The following free downloads provide report highlights are available on the WEF site.

Interactive website
Contents
Preface
Executive Summary
Index Rankings

The WEF report discusses eight areas of each country’s network readiness. Two areas of my interest are Unified Communications (UC) and “the new, current innovation modalities at the speed of light”.

The latter factor deals with the products and services the customer can choose from. One conclusion of the report is that openness is not enough. “Innovations must now be delivered at the speed of the customer’s personal and professional lives, eliminating the gap between what they are looking for and what they can have.” This is epitomized by the slow movement of the traditional carriers into UC and the impending competition coming from Google and Yahoo.

The WEF report covers a number of areas that are not technologically based, so the rankings produce, in my opinion, a higher ranking for the U.S. than we deserve when it comes to access bandwidth. The average advertised bandwidth available from 23 U.S. ISPs is 8.8 Mbps. On the one hand, this is higher than top ranked Denmark with 5.9 Mbps.

But advertised does not tell the whole story. I have DSL that is rated at 1.5 Mbps, but most of the time I get about 900 kbps service. The Comcast service in my neighborhood is advertised at 16 Mbps, but my Comcast neighbors average about 10% to 20% of this speed. So the advertised speed is NOT the usable speed either on DSL or cable ISP service. This is nothing new, but the report is overly optimistic in its delivered bandwidth assumptions.

If advertised speed is important, then the 100 Mbps service in Europe and 1 Gbps service in Japan make the U.S. look like the Comcast turtle. It appears that Verizon’s 50 Mbps service is already behind the times internationally.

Also, broadband penetration for Denmark is much higher than in the U.S.: 34.3 subscribers vs. 22.1 U.S. subscribers per 100 inhabitants. I would have expected this difference to produce a much lower ranking for the U.S. My first conclusion is that the improved U.S. ranking may have very little to do with the support of broadband service for UC.

My second conclusion is that the U.S. could--but does not--offer the ISP access speed that will really accelerate the collaboration and conferencing capabilities of UC. We will find that there will be a number of small offices and teleworkers that cannot subscribe to the broadband speeds that will accommodate UC well.