Saw this in the recent edition of the Chicago Tribune. Thought some on
the list would find it of interest.
Steve
Chicago's connections make it Second City again
By Rick Hepp
Tribune Staff Writer
October 13, 1999
Nicknames tend to be well-earned. So, when a study ranking the top 30
cities according to Internet accessibility came out, Chicagoans might
have known that their city would live up to its nickname.
The Second City ranked just behind Washington, D.C., in an Ohio State
University study that ranked U.S. cities by the level of
accessibility, or connectivity, they have to the Internet. Dallas, New
York and Atlanta rounded out the top five.
A city's connectivity plays a role in determining its annual growth in
such areas as e-commerce and broadband technologies, according to the
study, which was funded by Chicago-based Ameritech Corp.
To rank the cities, researchers measured how many Internet connections
a city had to the National Backbone Provider network, which links one
city to another. The U.S. network consists of 31 backbones connecting
141 cities through 848 linkages, according to the study.
"It's like a highway," said Morton O'Kelly, author of the study, which
appears in the current issue of the Professional Geographer. "The more
exits a city has on the highway, the more accessible it is."
"A city with a high degree of accessibility can offer more direct
paths to more places," he said.
With more paths available, a city's Internet access is faster and more
reliable because when one path fails, another path is available to
pick up the slack.
"This is one time when redundancy is good," said O'Kelly, a geography
professor at OSU.
It's no surprise Chicago was ranked so highly, O'Kelly said. The four
major national access points in the United States, called NAPs, are
Chicago, San Francisco, New York and Washington, D.C., the study said.
Started in 1994, each NAP is operated by a different telecommunication
company. Ameritech and Bellcore run Chicago's NAP.
Logically, these cities are high on the list, the study said, because
there are strong incentives for Internet Service Providers to connect
directly with the NAPs. "High speed routers, large bandwidth lines and
peering opportunities are all available at NAPs."
Even though Chicago started as a NAP and is ahead in accessibility
now, O'Kelly warned that doesn't mean it will stay there.
"The question is could Chicago fall in the rankings? The answer is
possibly yes," O'Kelly said, "if other places come up quicker and
telecommunications companies upgrade their systems faster than
Chicago."
Nationally, eight of the top 20 cities are in the West, five are in
the Northeast, four are in the Midwest and three are in the South,
according to the study.
The two densest areas of accessible cities are Silicon Valley and the
New York-Philadelphia-Washington, D.C region. "Both had the good
fortune to get an early jump on (Internet infrastructure) and build on
it," O'Kelly said.
Dallas and Atlanta are in the top five even though they are not NAPs.
The reason is that both act as hubs for major portions of the nation
with Dallas being the gateway to the Southwest and Atlanta handling
everything headed south from the North and West.
According to the study, the reason accessibility to Internet
infrastructure is so important to cities is that it's "an essential
part of the ... replacing of decaying industrial spaces with
technology centers".
An example of this occurred in Chicago in July when Mayor Richard M.
Daley announced a $250 million plan to transform part of the old
Lakeside Press, at 320 E. Cermak Rd., into the Lakeside Technology
Center.
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