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Los Angeles ranks 12th, compared against forty other cities worldwide, in its blend of broadband infrastructure and usage and social and economic benchmarks, as measured by Ericsson, a major provider of equipment and services to the telecoms industry. The latest edition of Ericsson’s Networked City Index has LA slipping one notch from the last time the index was run in 2014.
LA was on of three U.S. cities in the study. New York finished ahead at 7th, same as 2014, and Miami slipped two places further behind to 17th place. The index looks at the state of telecoms infrastructure, as well as its cost and the extent to which people are using it, and cross-compares it with several social and economic indicators that Ericsson thinks are particularly important – health, innovation, resources and economic competitiveness.
Ericsson has a particular point of view about such things – read the report and see how well, or not, it matches up with your own – which might go some way toward explaining why its hometown of Stockholm is way out in first place, and other Nordic capitals are also clustered up toward the top of the chart.
When you graph the rankings out on two axes – information and communications technology on one side and social markers, the so-called triple bottom line, on the other – LA’s peer group turns out to be Seoul and Taipei. There’s no narrative in the Index about LA, but there’s a short profile of Seoul, described as one of the “striving cities” – near enough to the top tier of world cities to be competitive, but with ample latitude to continuing growing in the direction that best suits it. That’s not a bad way to describe Los Angeles, either.