Study: Chicago tops Net-accessible cities

Different factors for businesses vs. consumers

(CNN) -- The city of Chicago, Illinois, has the most on-ramps to the information superhighway, which is good news for companies located there, according to a study published in this week's journal Environment and Planning B.

The study calculated the number of fiber-optic lines, the backbone of the Internet, that plugged into major United States cities. Researchers then ranked cities based on the number of connections they had to the fiber-optic network. The other cities rounding out the Top Five Internet accessible cities are Washington, DC; Dallas, Texas; Atlanta, Georgia; and New York.

"Internet accessible" means that information from servers based in those cities can be accessed more quickly than from servers in poorly connected cities. Downloading times for individual computers are less affected by the city's accessibility and more dependent on local phone lines and individual modems.

"We used similar methods to those used historically to assess railroads and interstate roads," said Morton O'Kelly, University of Ohio professor and co-author of the study. "If you're at the center of a bunch of track with spurs going off, you're highly accessible."

EXTRA INFORMATION View the complete list of the 30 leading U.S. cities with Internet accessibility

O'Kelly and researchers compiled maps of fiber-optic networks from more than 40 telecommunications companies. Raw data was obtained from a directory of Internet service providers (ISPs) assembled by the Internet business magazine Boardwatch.com. These maps look like typical road maps, depicting cities and the fiber-optic lines -- or Internet "roads" -- that connect them.

Researchers totaled the number of lines going into each city and ranked cities according to the number of Internet connections. "City" in the study did not include metropolitan areas. So although San Francisco ranks 6th in accessible cities, its metropolitan area (city and suburbs) actually ranks first.

"We're talking about the degree to which cities themselves are connected, not the final mile between the home and the Internet," said O'Kelly.

Trains to the station

The accessibility of a city is most important for industry. Companies with large databases want their clients to have fast access to these databases. If a company is located in a highly accessible city, there are more wires between that city and the Internet, and thus more ways for a company's server to be accessed.

However, a company may prefer a more isolated server for better security or if the server is a backup.

"This study is a measure of how fat the pipeline is between cities," said O'Kelly.

Although highly accessible cities are beneficial for companies, other factors are more important for consumers going online from home.

O'Kelly's study is a measure of how many Internet "roads" go from one city to others and is not a measure of the connections within a city, or intranet connections. This "final mile" between home and Internet comprises the users' modems and local telephone wires, and is usually what dictates the speed of Internet access, according to O'Kelly. Although your city may have a fast train system, you might have to walk several blocks from your house to the station.

Each year, Yahoo! Internet Life Magazine publishes a list of America's most-wired cities with a more consumer-oriented slant. Yahoo! takes the percentage of homes online, the types of connections they use, the number of online businesses, and the number of Internet sites in a city to calculate its list. In 2002, San Francisco was ranked No. 1.