Seattle crowned most wired city in America: where's your town?

Check it, Pacific Northwest -- Seattle, Washington was just named Forbes' most wired city for 2009, followed closely by Atlanta, Washington, D.C., Orlando and Boston. Of course, having Amazon and Microsoft within spitting distance probably didn't hurt matters, and the eleventy billion Starbucks WiFi hotspots likely pushed it over the edge. There are 25 other locales in the top 30 that we've yet to mention here, so head on down to the read link to see if your hometown made the cut. Oh, and way to represent, Raleigh -- numero fifteen ain't too shabby.

[Via cnmoody]

[ajax88 Posted Jan 24th 2009 9:45PM]

Seattle FTW!

[ustna Posted Jan 25th 2009 12:00AM]

Seattle is the best.

[imayam Posted Jan 25th 2009 12:32AM]

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!

[UnixSystemsEngineer Posted Jan 25th 2009 1:53AM]

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.

[(Unverified) Posted Jan 25th 2009 2:05AM]

Heck yes, represent!

[mikeweezer Posted Jan 25th 2009 2:39AM]

@Unix

Agreed - just moved to Seattle from the Bay. Sitting on 280 is way easier than waiting to cross the 520 bridge. Ouch.

[OneLove Posted Jan 25th 2009 2:46AM]

I'd bet washington DC is the most wired (tapped).

[(Unverified) Posted Jan 25th 2009 3:04AM]

Kinda funny how the most wired city has the most wireless hotspots.

[UnixSystemsEngineer Posted Jan 25th 2009 3:09AM]

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)

[01 Posted Jan 25th 2009 10:23AM]

@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.

[imthatoneguy Posted Jan 25th 2009 3:35PM]

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

[suicyclecom Posted Jan 26th 2009 2:22AM]

I don't even live Seattle, but definitely would have put it at the top of the list.

[GEN3RIC Posted Jan 24th 2009 9:49PM]

#7 Minneapolis. We have some of the best options like Comcasts' first rollout of DOCSIS 3.0 50mbps cable.

[thatdudefromthatplace Posted Jan 24th 2009 11:44PM]

Don't forget city-wide wi-fi!!! W00t!

[BobStewart Posted Jan 24th 2009 11:57PM]

Agreed, the city wide wifi is surprisingly good.... if only it were a little cheaper i would have continued my subscription :/

[OneLove Posted Jan 26th 2009 12:24PM]

Yo, what city wide wifi? (I didn't get that memo)

[solu Posted Jan 24th 2009 9:51PM]

Maybe if you call Comcast having a complete monopoly on broadband "wired" ...

[balls Posted Jan 24th 2009 9:53PM]

Yeah, it's too bad Qwest doesn't offer FTTP or DSL...

[(Unverified) Posted Jan 26th 2009 5:09AM]

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.

[balls Posted Jan 24th 2009 9:52PM]

You also forgot Google.

We got Google too.

[tsusurfanami Posted Jan 24th 2009 9:56PM]

And Valve Software. And Cray Inc. And Boeing. And Death Cab for Cutie.

[(Unverified) Posted Jan 24th 2009 10:05PM]

Google is in Mountain View, CA.

Nintendo of America's headquarters, college, and software developer (NST) are, however, in the Seattle area (Redmond).

[(Unverified) Posted Jan 24th 2009 10:42PM]

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.

[(Unverified) Posted Jan 24th 2009 10:53PM]

Death Cab is definitely a must. Legendary.

[Acqua206 Posted Jan 25th 2009 4:52AM]

Anyone here a UW student?? Lets go drinking!!!!!

[YoctoYotta Posted Jan 25th 2009 12:22PM]

Don't forget RealNetworks!!

Well, okay . . . you can forget RealNetworks.

Doesn't Adobe have a satellite office down in Fremont as well?

[(Unverified) Posted Jan 25th 2009 3:24PM]

@frezal2

not for long, they're moving to San Francisco

[imthatoneguy Posted Jan 25th 2009 3:35PM]

Adobe has an office.
Pixar's Renderman division.
Bungie.

[Anthop Posted Jan 25th 2009 5:29PM]

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).

[(Unverified) Posted Jan 24th 2009 9:54PM]

WOOT Seattle FTW

[(Unverified) Posted Jan 24th 2009 10:27PM]

seattle represent!

[ch3burashka Posted Jan 25th 2009 3:08AM]

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.

[kLid Posted Jan 24th 2009 10:01PM]

and where would Edmonton be on that list?

lmao jk

[Blazeitup Posted Jan 25th 2009 12:09AM]

near Saskatoon

[collegekid13 Posted Jan 25th 2009 4:00AM]

right near your alberta government cheque

[(Unverified) Posted Jan 25th 2009 6:49AM]

@collegekid13

That was quite a low blow. Still funny tho :D

[kklier Posted Jan 24th 2009 11:19PM]

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.

[BigReg Posted Jan 25th 2009 9:45AM]

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).

[(Unverified) Posted Jan 24th 2009 10:07PM]

... tell that to my 75-300k (at best) Clearwire connection.

[KeegdnaB Posted Jan 24th 2009 10:07PM]

Chicago is only 21?

FAIL

BTW, F*** You Comcast.....at least we have Uverse now

[(Unverified) Posted Jan 24th 2009 10:12PM]

If UIUC were a large city, we'd be number one by a wide margin. We're number one of universities, at any rate.

[Puhsitch Posted Jan 24th 2009 11:34PM]

UIUC is good, but Champaign-Urbana as a whole pretty much sucks. I can't even get DSL in south Urbana.

[ironman Posted Jan 24th 2009 10:12PM]

I'm from Atlanta and that surprised me

[Nikolas Posted Jan 24th 2009 10:27PM]

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.

[Medestruit Posted Jan 25th 2009 1:05AM]

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.

[Wiigee Posted Jan 24th 2009 10:17PM]

206 FTW!!!!

[credo Posted Jan 24th 2009 10:17PM]

bet they have FIOS...

[(Unverified) Posted Jan 24th 2009 10:21PM]

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.

[Lando Calrissian Posted Jan 25th 2009 1:19AM]

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.

[Lando Calrissian Posted Jan 25th 2009 1:37AM]

Oh, and I have FTTC, but the box is practically right next to my house, so FTTH wouldn't show much of a difference.