Seattle crowned most wired city in America: where's your town?
By Darren Murph 
posted Jan 24th 2009 9:41PM
posted Jan 24th 2009 9:41PM
[Via cnmoody]
Please note: If you're a current Engadget commenter, you do not need to re-register. Simply login and you will be prompted to select a username.
Seattle FTW!
Seattle is the best.
Thanks!!!11!!!1
I was really stressing where MY town was standing by number of technologicals!
Now that i got THAT out of my system, I can finally get some sleep!
Sort of. I moved to the bay area because the traffic and rain were intolerable. Yes, the bay area traffic is WAY better than Seattle.
Heck yes, represent!
@Unix
Agreed - just moved to Seattle from the Bay. Sitting on 280 is way easier than waiting to cross the 520 bridge. Ouch.
I'd bet washington DC is the most wired (tapped).
Kinda funny how the most wired city has the most wireless hotspots.
520? Shoot me now. I'd rather deal with the I-5 -> 90 -> 405 disaster than be parked on the evergreen bridge for hours.
(note: claim of great bay area traffic does not apply to 880/east bay)
@OneLove:
Im sure that cities with more than 500K people (unlike my fair city of DC) are going to have a few more taps then us. Besides, since the NSA put hub taps on the central servers of AT&T and the like, I think the whole country is pretty tapped at this point.
What are you doing cross a bridge? LIVE WHERE YOU WORK! :D
I'm a little suprised Seattle won considering we still don't have FIOS in king county
I don't even live Seattle, but definitely would have put it at the top of the list.
#7 Minneapolis. We have some of the best options like Comcasts' first rollout of DOCSIS 3.0 50mbps cable.
Don't forget city-wide wi-fi!!! W00t!
Agreed, the city wide wifi is surprisingly good.... if only it were a little cheaper i would have continued my subscription :/
Yo, what city wide wifi? (I didn't get that memo)
Maybe if you call Comcast having a complete monopoly on broadband "wired" ...
Yeah, it's too bad Qwest doesn't offer FTTP or DSL...
I see your attempt at sarcasm, but you are grossly missinformed if you think Qwest offers FTTP in addition to their DSL service in Seattle. Read the fine print on the Qwest propaganda. They only use fiber to the local node, then copper wire to your home.
Verizon is the only provider in WA that can give you true Fiber To The Premises. But alas, not in Seattle, due to Qwest and Comcast's duopoly.
You also forgot Google.
We got Google too.
And Valve Software. And Cray Inc. And Boeing. And Death Cab for Cutie.
Google is in Mountain View, CA.
Nintendo of America's headquarters, college, and software developer (NST) are, however, in the Seattle area (Redmond).
Yes, Google is HQ in Mountain View, but they have a division in Fremont (suburb of Seattle). Intel also has a division in the U District.
Death Cab is definitely a must. Legendary.
Anyone here a UW student?? Lets go drinking!!!!!
Don't forget RealNetworks!!
Well, okay . . . you can forget RealNetworks.
Doesn't Adobe have a satellite office down in Fremont as well?
@frezal2
not for long, they're moving to San Francisco
Adobe has an office.
Pixar's Renderman division.
Bungie.
Yeah, Intel has a research division in the U District.
And don't forget that Amazon is headquartered here too.
And aside from UW, which has a highly ranked Computer Engineering department, there's Digipen, next to the Nintendo headquarters, which is a well known college focusing on teaching people how to make video games. (The Portal developers graduated from there).
WOOT Seattle FTW
seattle represent!
REPRESENTED!!!
This is some awesome news, but it bums me out even more seeing as how I sometimes lose all-but-emergency service in some areas of Chief Sealth's great city.
and where would Edmonton be on that list?
lmao jk
near Saskatoon
right near your alberta government cheque
@collegekid13
That was quite a low blow. Still funny tho :D
So, it's cool to see Raleigh represented here, but the speed of the broadband offered to consumers is terrible. Download speeds are ok, but upload speeds seem stuck at the turn of the century.
It is cool to see Raleigh on the list, but not the huge drop down to #15. I wonder if this is just Raleigh or actually the Triangle area. I suspect only Raleigh because the majority of Research Triangle Park employees likely *don't* live in Raleigh, including myself. The broadband adoption for the areas we do live in has to be extremely high.
And as far as speeds, I'm rockin' 15Mbps down and 2Mbps up in Morrisville (and actually see those speeds, thanks Time Warner).
... tell that to my 75-300k (at best) Clearwire connection.
Chicago is only 21?
FAIL
BTW, F*** You Comcast.....at least we have Uverse now
If UIUC were a large city, we'd be number one by a wide margin. We're number one of universities, at any rate.
UIUC is good, but Champaign-Urbana as a whole pretty much sucks. I can't even get DSL in south Urbana.
I'm from Atlanta and that surprised me
Same, I was really surprised to see Atlanta in the the 30. Then, after I read that they had been number 1 for the past couple of years, it was pretty cool.
I have a feeling the reason Atlanta is so high is mainly due to Bellsouth's HQ's being based out of downtown, and the CDC has a pretty vast network as well.
206 FTW!!!!
bet they have FIOS...
Seattle doesn’t belong anywhere on this list. I live 10 minutes (walking) from downtown and have two options: a shady local cable connection (used to be called Millennium Cable until they changed their name due to bad rep), and Qwest DSL. My "7 mbps" Qwest DSL tops out at about 2.4 mbps and has latencies between 100 and 250 ms for anything outside of Seattle.
I want FTTP & DOCSIS 3.0, and want them ASAP.
My "8mbps" Cox Cable connection bottoms out at 14mbps and tops around 22mbps, and gets a consistent 7ms ping, 28ms if I'm testing across the country.
Oh, and I have FTTC, but the box is practically right next to my house, so FTTH wouldn't show much of a difference.
Have you tried looking up Speakeasy DSL? It's expensive, but unlike Qwest you actually get the speed you pay for, low latencies, plus a static IP.
So true, downtown offerings suck.
Baltimore has...WiMAX! Woohoo!
Pretty much every tech company has a office in Seattle including Google, Toshiba, Nintendo, Zappos, Sony and on and on. It doesn't hurt that we're the closest big US city to Japan, China, and the rest of Asia. Hell, half of University of Washington is Asian exchange students (at least it was 2 years ago before I graduated), and we even have "Ichiro express flights" from Japan so tourists can fly over for a day or two and watch Ichiro play. Plus, we're inside all the time it rains a lot. :(
Isn't "wired" due for a one way trip the the heap of computer anachronisms? I'm using a desktop right now, but most of my Internet access is on laptops and phones that aren't plugged into power, much less a network.
My town is north of Seattle. Where's yours?
How far north? Canada or bust!
15-20 minute drive from the border.
15-20 from the border? Do you live in Blaine?
...I'm sorry.
#17.
Ballard Baby!
Woot! The 407 (orlando) finally gets some of the tech rep it deserves. We literally have at least 20 reputable providers where I live, and all speeds are almost exactly as advertised... not to mention we are getting WiMax soon and that Sprint, AT&T and even T-Mobile all have excellent 3G coverage in most places around here (Sprint pretty much covers from coast to coast, and then some)
Orlando is #4 btw
I'm kind of surprised at Orlando ranking so highly. It certainly doesn't *feel* especially wired to me, but 15 Mbit internet from Brighthouse that actually works as fast as advertised makes me a happy camper.
@Phil 407 is the area code, not rank.
Yeah, I know... i live there
#18, New Orleans... figured we'd at least make the list since we have municipal Wi-Fi.
Isn't #30 #1? The numbers go up as you progress in rank (ie. Boston (#5) broadband adoption is 4 while Portland (#14) is at 23)
The numbers represent their rank overall I would assume. So Seattle ranks first on the Wifi hot-spots because they have the most.
I thought Philly would have done a little better than #27, since we have that "whole city" municipal wi-fi thing. It doesn't really cover the whole city but it does cover a lot of ground. I guess our twenty percent broadband adoption rate is what's killing us.
Tastykake FTW!
BAH atx's dead last. yet it considers itself the "silicon valley of texas"
right......
You mean most wired city in the USA I believe..
Hate when people call America to the USA when its the whole continent.
Had to say it,
Nacho
are you serious?
Not to mention South America...
But it's too much of an accepted term to die. Even foreigners call citizens of the U.S. 'Americans'. I think the term has to do that America is the last part of the nation's name, so you wouldn't call its people 'United States of Americans'. Kinda hangs off the tongue strangely.
No, you fail. Technically you are correct, we are officially called USA, but everyone also calls us America, which is not the name of any continent. America is in North America, and there is also Central America and South America, and collectively people call them the Americas. There is no continent called America.
-Taylor
Get your head out of your ass and go cry somewhere else about how small your self esteem is. No one has any trouble determining what "America" means, and no one confuses "the Americas", "North America", "Central America", or "South America" and "America" with eachother.
Also, have you noticed that if you look at America for long enough it starts feeling like a really weird word? I guess that's just me.
Seattle: #1 most wired city, #1 worst public transportation. Man this city's on a roll!
Ah, not worst. This Seattlite stunned the people she was visiting in El Paso when she announced she was going to take the bus downtown.
They were all, no. You just don't do that.c
And I am within 3 blocks of at least 5 or 6 different buses (4 stops near my house, on different streets) and I can get anywhere.
So yeah, we still suck at the whole light rail etc. business, but not the worst. Just bad.
Darn, Houston fell just short of the list. Too bad Earthlink and Houston City Council didn't commit to the city-wide WiFi blanket.
Toronto isn't there (obviously, not in America but in Canada), but I wonder how we stack up?
I'm betting a few Canadian cities would be very high on that list. Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Calgary probably have a shot at dethroning Seattle even. Calgary especially is VERY connected.
I'm not even going to look up cleveland.
You should see how crowded parts of California are these days!
Jeremy Cushing
Atlanta, dropping down to #2...
Rep'n that Detroitttt....thats not on the list -_- FAIL.
I feel as if i'm the only Engadget checker in the D :/
Oh well, at least we have a good economy here....
...oh wait.
You forgot about me!!! Rep'n the Rochester!
Man...Philly needs to get out of the 1700s...seriously WTF #27? cmon now.
Hey I'm from Seattle. Fuck all of you other cities.
i love you.
Portland just edges out Raleigh. Our little Metro-Wifi project was a complete disaster, as many municipal wi-fi projects tend to be. Clear is in town though. Wi-Fi for all, anywhere (or whomever can afford it) is starting to shape up.
That's Clear 'Wimax' btw. I'd be interested in hearing from people in Portland who are using it on how it's going before I make the leap.
Hi I'm sorry but BE WARNED. ALL THIS RADIATION IN THE AIR - WHAT ARE THE CANCER RATES FOR THAT PLACE?
Baltimore has WiMax and i use it for $30 a month biatches... lol
I have FIOS (100mbit) here in Toronto, directly piped to my condo. There is a similar setup in Alberta I think? Canada is definitely getting on-board with the latest technologies but we need more competition.
Microsoft is in Redmond. Redmond is definitely NOT Seattle.
Yeah.. Redmond is like... 15 minutes away from Seattle.. that's sooo far away :-P
Besides, most Softies live in Seattle. I'm annoyed when people try to distance Seattle from Microsoft for coolness, when in reality Seattle would be a Detroit-esque city with Boeing the only employer had Bill G. not wanted to go back home from Nevada :-)
For a second, I thought that was calling Seattle the #1 most weird city in the US, and haveing been through Fremont,I wasn't about to disagree with the findings.
what's so weird about overpriced condos and a dearth of thai restaurants?
Seattle's wealth destroyed its interestingness.
bah, thought jam... overabundance of thai restaurants, dearth of dives and late night diners.
Seattle life has no fear, no edge, no bad neighborhoods, no excitement... man, I actually miss WiMAX-enhanced crime-ridden crapholes like Baltimore. :)
Yay, Odessa, Texas!