Sparking The Wi-Fi Revolution

By | March 25, 2005

Glancing at the charts on JiWire’s newlook website of the top 10 Wi-Fi countries and cities, I wondered whether it was worth taking a closer look at the figures to see if there’s any conclusions we could draw about the wireless revolution.

The figures only include those commercially available hotspots, as far as I can figure out. But they’re still interesting. In sheer numbers London Wifi london is way ahead with more than 1,200 hotspots, followed by Tokyo (904) Wifi tokyo and New York (851) Wifi ny. But all these cities are different sizes. How about hotspots per capita? Taking populations of the metropolitan areas of these cities things look a bit different.

If the figures are correct, then Paris has by far the most hotspots Wifi paris with about 35 per 100,000 people, followed by London Wifi london 2 with about 17 and Singapore Wifi singapore with just under 16. Of U.S. cities, Chicago Wifi chicago comes out ahead of New York Wifi ny 2 and San Francisco Wifi sf.

Aware that by looking at metropolitan areas only these results may be distorted a little, I looked at JiWire’s country figures. The U.S. is way ahead in terms of numbers Wifi us with more than 24,000 hotspots. The UK has less than half that Wifi uk with Japan the only Asian country putting in an appearance Wifi japan in the top 10. But what about when the ‘Hotspot Per 100,000 People’ rule is applied?

Once again things look different. Switzerland, with only 1,300 hotspots, has more than 17 per 100,000 people Wifi swiss which is about the same level of access Londoners have. Indeed, the whole of the UK appears to be pretty well provided for: With nearly 10,000 hotspots, there are more or less the same number of hotspots per 100,000 throughout the country as there are in the capital Wifi uk 2. Elsewhere the picture is less impressive: The U.S. falls into third place Wifi us 2 with exactly half the ratio of hotspots in the UK with Germany Wifi germany France Wifi france and Australia Wifi australia trailing behind. Japan, with less than two hotspots per 100,000 people Wifi japan 2 is clearly not worth traveling around with a Wifi laptop as aren’t Italy Wifi italy and Spain Wifi spain.

And finally, without wanting to be biased, the ‘country’ chart doesn’t include Hong Kong and Singapore, both of them separate adminstrative entities that happen also to be cities. Given that, they both put in a good performance in the ‘country’ chart too, with Singapore Wifi singapore 2 coming only slightly behind Switzerland and UK and Hong Kong Wifi hong kong 2 roughly on a par with Germany.

Conclusion? Looking for a Wifi-friendly place to live outside the U.S.? Try the UK or Switzerland in Europe, and Singapore in Asia.

2 thoughts on “Sparking The Wi-Fi Revolution

  1. Adam Keys

    I really like the Tuftian stuff you’ve been doing of late. Did you get the idea to put the charts inline from Tufte or is that Original Wagstaff-fu?

    Reply
  2. JW

    Wish I could say it was Wagstaffian, but Tufte suggests it in his Sparklines chapter here http://tinyurl.com/2mfko .

    I’m still experimenting, and would appreciate any reader feedback. It’s hard to make them sit well with surrounding text when you can’t quite control how that text appears in the user’s browser. These ones, I think, are too big whatever the size of the surrounding font.

    I use the excellent Word plug-in from Bissantz, by the way: http://www.bissantz.de/sparklines/ It’s not perfect but it’s by far the easiest way to create sparklines quickly. I then screen capture the result and insert as a GIF. Perhaps there’s a better way…

    Jeremy

    Reply

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