My Gamma Numbers Shine a Light on Some of the Stars
Sep. 26, 2011
By Roger Strukhoff
Sys-con.com
The US, by contrast, has a Gamma Number of only 25. Meanwhile, impoverished Cambodia has a Gamma Number of 252 - ten times that of the US. The country's average Internet speed is only 20% that of the US, but its per-person income is only about 2% of the US. It punches a lot harder with its limited resources.
Cambodia has an average speed of 2,000 Kbps (2.0 Mbps), and one has to wonder what percentage of that bandwidth is used by government and business, and what percentage of the country's population has personal access to any Internet service. But among its economic peers, Cambodia seems to be a bright light.
History has already recorded that unrealistic - even ridiculous - business models burst the dot-com bubble at the turn of the century.
I've always thought slow Internet connections in the United States were at least as culpable. The "Worldwide Wait" was a reality for most consumers in those days, and the US was driving what was then thought to be a New Economy.
Today, the Web, led as much by social networking as by eCommerce, is a global phenomenon. The US still dominates in creating companies, whether in social networking or cloud computing. But the nations of the world are getting more, and faster, connections.
Who is leading the world, and how does the US rate today?
Look at the Numbers
Rolling, 30-day stats put together by Seattle-based Ookla show the US lagging behind the world leaders. Ookla monitors average and peak bandwidth levels from the around the world, from servers in Chicago. The company notes that the numbers are based on all types of connections - cable, DSL, T- lines, and satellite.
So these numbers present a rough picture only - your mileage may vary depending on what sort of connection you have.
What's of most interest to me is to see how the regions of the world compare, and to tease out the developing nations in particular that seem to be doing a good job in deploying high-speed connections.
Bandwidth is part of infrastructure these days, as critical as roads, water, and electricity for leaders who want to develop their nations. It's also critical to those highly developed nations that wish to remain competitive, who don't wish to go into decline by dint of creaking infrastructure.
It will surprise no one to see the Scandinavian and Baltic nations, along with South Korea, leading the world. Conventional wisdom is that it's easy to bring fast service to highly urbanized countries such as this.
Time to Correlate
But I'd like to go beyond those numbers and correlate wealth with bandwidth. It makes intuitive sense that poorer nations can't afford to deploy a lot of high bandwidth or that their people could pay for it.
But how well are poorer, developing nations doing based on their per-person income? What sort of "pound-for-pound" punching power do they have?
We can start by simply dividing average Internet speed in kilobits-per-second (Kbps) by per-person income as expressed in US dollars.
Lithuania has an average Internet speed of 14,431Kbps (14.4Mbps) and an average per-person income of $11,141 (according to World Bank figures.) South Korea has an average Internet speed of 28,660 Kbps (28.7Mbps) with an average income of $17,100.
Dividing the one into the other, Lithuania and South Korea get 304Kbps and 138Kbps per $100 in income, respectively. Let's pick a nice Greek letter, and designate the results as "Gamma Numbers" of 304 and 138, respectively.
The US, by contrast, has a Gamma Number of only 25. Meanwhile, impoverished Cambodia has a Gamma Number of 252 - ten times that of the US. The country's average Internet speed is only 20% that of the US, but its per-person income is only about 2% of the US. It punches a lot harder with its limited resources.
Cambodia has an average speed of 2,000 Kbps (2.0 Mbps), and one has to wonder what percentage of that bandwidth is used by government and business, and what percentage of the country's population has personal access to any Internet service. But among its economic peers, Cambodia seems to be a bright light.
Shining a Light
My goal, first with my initial Tau Index last year, and now with these Gamma Numbers, is to uncover the bright lights - the stars - that may otherwise be obscured by a surface-level look at raw statistics. They're not meant to have the scientific precision of sending something to the moon, but rather, are meant as a starting point in the journey to find out what's really going on in the nations of the world.
I'm putting together a report with dozens of factors to reveal the world's bright lights when it comes to Cloud Computing. I'm publishing the report at a small Web 2.0 event here in Manila in early November, then at the very large Cloud Expo coming up in Santa Clara.
It seems that Gamma Numbers cannot follow a straight-line projection; Sweden, for example, would have to average almost 100Mbps per connection to equal Cambodia's Gamma Number. Ridiculous? Or not? Today's reality is these numbers follow a curve that flattens out as nations get wealthier; I think they always will, even as overall speeds increase.
So here is a look at selected countries by region, with a few top performers in each. Several things pop out that I'll discuss in a follow-up article.
My advice for now: these are the places in each region to visit if you want to develop your business or invest your money.
GAMMA NUMBERS
Western Europe
Sweden - 68
Portugal - 64
Netherlands - 59
Notes
Germany - 42
UK - 29
Eastern Europe
Ukraine - 228
Lithuania - 197
Romania - 173
Latvia - 167
Bulgaria - 162
Americas
Honduras - 58
Brazil - 54
Chile - 45
Notes
Canada - 30
Mexico - 30
United States - 25
North Africa/Middle East
Morocco - 64
Jordan - 52
Notes
Israel - 24
Egypt - 23
Saudi Arabia - 18
Iran - 5
Sub-Saharan Africa
Kenya - 211
Nigeria - 41
South Africa - 29
Note
These are the only Sub-Saharan African nations for which I have complete info. Am working to improve this.
Northern Asia
South Korea - 105
China - 52
Japan - 51
Southern Asia
Vietnam - 311
Cambodia - 252
Thailand - 73
Notes
India - 52
Don't have complete numbers for Taiwan. Working on it.
8 comments:
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-09-south-korea-tops-internet-download.html
US has more users to rate at a lower gamma?
My internet is fast as the speed of light. I always see light before any contents appear.
Stupid comparison!
Not sure about gamma calculation and it suppose to prove but in raw speed South Korean seems to be the fastest.
When it comes to real world application the US always behind every other nations, although the US invented/created almost every new technologies. This is due to many factors including money and consequences to pay.
stupid news. fucking K1 what is this shit. You know Cambodia ang got shit. why even compare to US or S Korea about internet speed. Why dont compare how undevelope or how poor khmer is! really sstupids
Confusing article !! jumble mumble with numbers. Means absolutely nothing. KI shouldn't post anything like this.
i think cambodia, having come late in the technological age, has advantage with the electronic age like cell phone usage and other latest and advance in technology. take the cellular phone, for example, as land line was destroyed under the KR regime, cell phones now play a vital role in that almost everyone in cambodia can afford to have a cell phone. it is inexpensive to own a cell phone and use the internet in cambodia; almost everyone in cambodia do own a cell phone as a daily necessity.
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