I recently made a trip from Stockholm to Sydney. Sydney is really an iconic city, so beautiful and full of nice people! My hometown Stockholm and Sydney are located 15584 kilometers away from each other – roughly a 24 hour flight – and both cities are measured in the Ericsson City Index 2016. The City Index consists of a report and an interactive tool to compare and explore cities. So let’s have a look at how two of the world’s most beautiful cities do index-wise.
At first look, Stockholm is ranked number 1 and Sydney ranked in the middle of the index at place 20. How come? What are the major differences?
First of all, let me explain shortly how we have built the index. What we measure is Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) maturity and Triple Bottom Line (TBL) development in the city. ICT maturity and TBL development are both divided into three dimensions. The TBL dimensions – social, economic, and environmental – reflect the three dimensions of sustainable development. ICT maturity is broken down into ICT infrastructure, ICT affordability, and ICT usage. These three dimensions capture the complexity of the connected society: a well-developed infrastructure, a competitive market that offers affordable prices to citizens and businesses, and sufficient know-how to invent, adopt, and adapt new ICT solutions.
As number 20 in the Networked Society City Index, Sydney is somewhat below what would be expected considering the size of its economy. Overall, Sydney performs better in the ICT maturity dimensions than in the TBL dimensions. The city has the second-best mobile broadband quality of all the index cities, but fixed broadband is lacking in quality compared with other similar cities. On the TBL side, Sydney performs best in the economic dimension. It has a competitive economy with a large number of business start-ups per capita.
Stockholm’s top ranking comes down to performing exceptionally well in all dimensions of both ICT maturity and in the TBL part of the index. Stockholm also scores well when it comes to ICT affordability and ICT infrastructure. This is reflected in the city’s ICT usage, which is among the highest in the index. Stockholm is also ranked first in the economic and environmental dimensions of the TBL.
You can explore these cities and 38 more and a number of parameters in our interactive tool.
Explore the Index at:
Mikael Eriksson Björling 
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