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September 16, 2014

Germany beats UK in global connectivity ranking

Advice for UK decision makers? Boost the telcos!

By Ben Sullivan

Huawei has spun out to the market its first ever ranking of the most ‘connected’ countries in the world, and the UK has ended up in third place.

Called the Global Connectivity Index, the study researched 25 countries, 10 industries and thousands of CIOs and IT practitioners. Germany was the most connected country, alongside the USA, which both scored 76.

Rankings were calculated by a number of factors such as IT activity per person, average broadband download speed, smartphone connections and telco investments.

The UK scored 75, the second highest in Europe. William Xu, strategy marketing officer for Huawei, told the audience at Huawei’s 2014 Cloud Congress: "Connectivity in our lives is like air and water, which means we cannot live without connectivity."

The Chinese firm which is best known for smartphones but has recently made a push into the enterprise services market and has a long history in networking, said that it predicts 100 billion connections by 2025.

Xu said: "We’re just in the initial stage of full connectivity, but we are [largely still] in the age of the consumer internet."

Businesses from both developed and emerging countries were included in the study, pulling data from a variety of industries including finance, manufacturing, education, and transportation.

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CBR spoke to Xu after his keynote, and asked what the UK can do to pull level or even ahead of Germany. Xu said: "Where there is enterprise, there should be a market. If we look at the relation between population and enterprise equipment there’s not a strong link. It has a lot to do with GDP and IT investment.

"If we look at areas [that have] a low index, telco investment is also a little bit low, the smartphone increase ratio is low, and IP growth rate per capita is low.

"Therefore there will need to be great improvement in terms of telecom infrastructure construction and broadband investment," said Xu.

When asked what advice decision makers could take from the index, and why they might even trust a report that is arguably not completely independent and without agenda, Xu told CBR: "The report is published from our perspective. Whether they believe it or not is up to them. The index we have published is the first objective scientifically researched index."

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