Glancing at the charts on JiWire’s newlook website of the top 10 Wi-Fi countries and cities, I wondered whether it was worth taking a closer look at the figures to see if there’s any conclusions we could draw about the wireless revolution.
The figures only include those commercially available hotspots, as far as I can figure out. But they’re still interesting. In sheer numbers London 
is way ahead with more than 1,200 hotspots, followed by Tokyo (904) 
and New York (851) 
. But all these cities are different sizes. How about hotspots per capita? Taking populations of the metropolitan areas of these cities things look a bit different.
If the figures are correct, then Paris has by far the most hotspots 
with about 35 per 100,000 people, followed by London 
with about 17 and Singapore 
with just under 16. Of U.S. cities, Chicago 
comes out ahead of New York 
and San Francisco 
.
Aware that by looking at metropolitan areas only these results may be distorted a little, I looked at JiWire’s country figures. The U.S. is way ahead in terms of numbers 
with more than 24,000 hotspots. The UK has less than half that 
with Japan the only Asian country putting in an appearance 
in the top 10. But what about when the ‘Hotspot Per 100,000 People’ rule is applied?
Once again things look different. Switzerland, with only 1,300 hotspots, has more than 17 per 100,000 people 
which is about the same level of access Londoners have. Indeed, the whole of the UK appears to be pretty well provided for: With nearly 10,000 hotspots, there are more or less the same number of hotspots per 100,000 throughout the country as there are in the capital 
. Elsewhere the picture is less impressive: The U.S. falls into third place 
with exactly half the ratio of hotspots in the UK with Germany 
France 
and Australia 
trailing behind. Japan, with less than two hotspots per 100,000 people 
is clearly not worth traveling around with a Wifi laptop as aren’t Italy 
and Spain 
.
And finally, without wanting to be biased, the ‘country’ chart doesn’t include Hong Kong and Singapore, both of them separate adminstrative entities that happen also to be cities. Given that, they both put in a good performance in the ‘country’ chart too, with Singapore 
coming only slightly behind Switzerland and UK and Hong Kong 
roughly on a par with Germany.
Conclusion? Looking for a Wifi-friendly place to live outside the U.S.? Try the UK or Switzerland in Europe, and Singapore in Asia.
I really like the Tuftian stuff you’ve been doing of late. Did you get the idea to put the charts inline from Tufte or is that Original Wagstaff-fu?
Wish I could say it was Wagstaffian, but Tufte suggests it in his Sparklines chapter here http://tinyurl.com/2mfko .
I’m still experimenting, and would appreciate any reader feedback. It’s hard to make them sit well with surrounding text when you can’t quite control how that text appears in the user’s browser. These ones, I think, are too big whatever the size of the surrounding font.
I use the excellent Word plug-in from Bissantz, by the way: http://www.bissantz.de/sparklines/ It’s not perfect but it’s by far the easiest way to create sparklines quickly. I then screen capture the result and insert as a GIF. Perhaps there’s a better way…
Jeremy