ICT rankings of countries will always spark some robust discussion, and the release last week of the OECD’s latest quarterly report didn’t disappoint. A couple of minutes after this newsletter went out last week detailing the OECD’s findings, a friend in Singapore was questioning that country’s absence from the leaderboard.

Of course we all now know that Singapore isn’t a member of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, which is a pretty lean grouping of just 30 countries, the majority of them European. It does, however, have “active relationships” with 70 others, including Singapore, but the data in this case came from the core members.

If it had of been an OECD member, Singapore would have probably fared well, given that it does okay in most of the other surveys of this nature. In the World Economic Forum’s latest Global Information Technology Report, just released in March and which judges “networked readiness”, it came in third behind Denmark and Sweden, while last week it jumped into the top 10, at number six, of the Economist Intelligence Unit E-readiness rankings. That one again saw Denmark in the No 1 spot, with Sweden and the U.S. joint second.

So while there is some consistency in the rankings – you can bet on the Scandinavians doing well – for other countries there’s quite a bit of movement up and down the scale. In the case of the OECD listings, there’s been some notable disagreement in Australia as we’ve already reported in these pages, while OECD communications analyst Taylor Reynolds clarified its data collection to CommsDay yesterday, noting that while the organisation largely relies on government data, where it is unavailable it goes direct to carriers and makes calculated estimates.

Australia isn’t the only one peeved by their low-ish ranking in the OECD stats, however. In the U.S. there’s also a fair bit of consternation about the country’s ranking, which as it turns out was just one place above Australia at number 15. That fall of three places from the previous survey, as well as other ranking drops – it dropped six spots in the World Economic Forum listing – was enough to force a Senate Commerce Committee enquiry last week into the state of U.S. broadband.

According to some reports, the problems in the U.S. are similar to those reported in Australia, such as different country definitions of broadband and inadequate collection of data.

Jeffrey Eisenach, chairman of Criterion Economics, a Washington-based consulting firm, commented that current FCC data is not useful, in that it doesn’t give adequate geographical breakdowns of broadband availability, nor does it give information about the quality of access. He also noted that the last time the national census gathered broadband data in the U.S. was 2003 – “It might as well have been collected in 1903,” he was quoted as saying.

Another thing that differs is people’s definition of a “crisis in broadband”. For example, a visitor reading some of the comments in the Australian media about broadband access might think the situation is dire. Yet if that visitor was from some parts of Southeast Asia they’d probably think Oz consumers were spoilt for choice. I know I did when I visited last month.

Similarly, I’m sure the U.S. is nowhere near as bad as some of the lobbyists make it out to be. For example, I was reading a report from VoIP pioneer Jeff Pulver about his experience in Stockholm and comparing it to his own connection in the U.S. According to the people he was with the “normal” connectivity that most people living in the city of Stockholm have is 24MB downstream 8MB up, while newer apartments in Stockholm have access to 100MB of connectivity. His own Verizon fibre connection in the U.S. was closer to 8MB down and 3MB upstream, but at a higher cost. Personally I would have settled for either country’s connections.

Then again, I’m sure in both Sweden and the U.S. you can find places that are also off the broadband map. It makes you wonder if we should be judging cities rather than countries.

In fact, I would be interested in hearing reader’s views on what the criteria for broadband rankings should be. For Asia Pacific, for example, would it be fairer to compare cities rather than countries, given that it’s cities that are often competing on the global stage? And what other criteria could we use to judge a city? Education? Wireless access? Pricing? Government regulation or lack of it?

If anyone has any thoughts, please email me at geoff@commsday.com.au. If we get enough ideas we may even publish our own rankings list – if for no other reason than to generate some controversy and debate. – Geoff Long

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