SAN FRANCISCO: Contradicting earlier studies, conventional wisdom and politicians rhetoric, European researchers say that the Internet infrastructure in the United States is one of the worlds best and getting better.

The Global Information Technology Report issued Wednesday found that the United States now ranks fourth in the world, behind Denmark, Sweden and Switzerland. Last year, the United States was seventh.

The study showed a number of global trends. Five Nordic countries were reported among the worlds top 10. South Korea posted one of the most significant improvements in the last year, rising 10 places to 9th, and China moved up five positions to 57th.

The study, which has been issued annually for the last seven years, seeks to draw a more complete picture of national network readiness.

The study was done by Insead, a French business school, on behalf of the World Economic Forum, a policy and conference group based in Switzerland. It used an index generated from 68 variables, including market factors, political and regulatory environment and technology infrastructure rather than just bandwidth capacity and data transmission speeds.

Some Internet industry veterans were skeptical of the positive claims about United States.

“My gut feeling is that we dont have the type of deployment you have abroad,” said David Farber, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. “If you are looking at broadband, we have a lot of problems.”

The Insead assessment offers a stark contrast to other appraisals based on single measures that have portrayed the United States as both lagging and declining in the broadband boom. Last year, a range of statistics on global bandwidth use indicated that the United States was trailing other industrial nations in both broadband network consumption and penetration as a percentage of population.

For example, statistics maintained by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development gave a conflicting message.

The average advertised broadband download speed of 23 U.S. providers was 8.8 megabits a second, while the average for 23 providers in Denmark was a considerably slower 5.9 megabits. At the same time, the number of broadband subscribers in Denmark was 34.3 for every 100 inhabitants compared with 22.1 in the United States, according to a study in October 2007.

But one author of the Insead report said the narrow measures had failed to capture the true impact the Internet has when it was considered in a cultural, economic and political context.

“What the U.S. has is a number of strengths along a number of dimensions,” said Soumitra Dutta, a professor of information systems at Insead and the director of the study. “It is not just a question of technology. Political and economic factors become extremely important.”

He pointed to France as a technology leader in terms of network services that had trailed in the study, ranked 21.

“Its not because France is lacking in technology,” Dutta said.

“If you look at other kinds of regulatory issues and labor conditions, you find a rigid situation that prohibits companies from making the most effective use of technology.”

An OECD economist acknowledged the nuances in taking into account government regulatory and related factors and said that it was hard to draw a single conclusion from the data.

“I think we can say that a lot of the situation in the United States is a result of the lack of competition,” said Taylor Reynolds, an economist in the Internet and telecommunications policy section of the OECD. “In Europe, we have adopted an unbundling strategy wholeheartedly.”

That has led to more competition in markets outside the United States, he said, which in turn has driven Internet service providers elsewhere to offer higher-speed service and lower prices.

One aspect of global competition that is being watched closely, Reynolds added, is the way fiber optic networks are being introduced. The United States has begun to speed the availability of fiber optic services, but it is lagging behind Europe and Asia in network speeds. While Verizon is offering 50-megabit FIOS in the United States, for example, 100-megabit services are common in Europe, and the Japanese are offering 1-gigabit services.

Industry executives in the United States said the Insead report was a bigcounterweight to the OECD statistics. “Being an optimist, Im seeing some significant and promising things happening in the United States,” said Robert Pepper, senior managing director of global advanced technology policy at Cisco Systems, the worlds largest networking equipment maker. Australia scraps rural plan

Australia could be closer to building a high-speed broadband network after the government canceled a deal for a rural system that would have overlapped with the one planned nationwide, Reuters reported from Melbourne. The scrapping of the rural network plan, which was to cost 958 million Australian dollars, or $889 million, came as the government planned to invite bids for a national network as early as next week. It is offering 4.7 billion dollars in financing, which it wants the winning business to match.

ATHENS: To protest Deutsche Telekoms plan to buy a controlling stake in OTE, the former monopoly telecommunications provider in Greece, some employees staged a flag-burning outside Parliament last week. But there was one problem: The flags they chose were Belgian, not German, photographsshowed.

The incident illustrated Greek sensitivity over sales of prized national assets, as well as the apparent futility of the protestersresponse.

According to Greek officials, the government hopes to complete plans this week for Deutsche Telekom to buy an OTE stake worth nearly  billion, or about $4.6 billion. The sale is the centerpiece in the privatization plan of the governing conservatives, who won re-election last September and now hold a small majority among the 300 seats in the Greek Parliament. They have pledged to modernize the economy by luring foreign investment and revamping the sometimes corrupt and often inefficient publicsector.

“If signed, this deal will be a watershed,” Finance Minister George Alogoskoufis said Friday. “It will send a message and secure OTEs future development with one of the best possible strategicpartners.”

Deutsche Telekom, the biggest telephone company in Europe, has already agreed to buy a 19.9 percent stake from a private equity group, Marfin Investment Group Holdings, for .6 billion. It wants to buy an additional 3 percent from the Greek government initially and eventually increase its stake to become OTEs biggestshareholder.

According to Alogoskoufis, the deal being discussed envisions Deutsche Telekom and OTE each controlling half of the 10 board seats, with Deutsche Telekom appointing OTEs chief executive and the Greek government naming the chairman. The company, according to Alogoskoufis, would retain its name, and the government would have to be consulted over labor issues and asset sales for as long as it retained control of at least 5 percent ofOTE.

Financial advisers have been scrambling to work out details of the deal, including the final purchase price and the workings of the power-sharing arrangement between Deutsche Telekom and OTE, which is 28 percent-owned by the Greek government. Alogoskoufis said the discussions had been “constructive” but cautioned that there were still possible stickingpoints.

“Sometimes deals can turn unstable on matters of detail,” hesaid.

One such detail is the management-sharing arrangement. Critics of the plan, including some senior conservatives and stalwarts of market liberalism, say the government is going about the OTE sale in the wrong way, and choosing the wrongpartner.

“This model of co-managment is bad for both sides because you cant run a corporation by committee,” said Stefanos Manos, a conservative former finance minister, under whom the government began the privatization of OTE in1993.

“Itll be schizophrenia. One side will be driven by political considerations and the second by market and consumer demands,” hesaid.

The government, he said, should have sought an American or Asian partner that would have used OTE as an entry point to Europe, giving the partnership “a whole other scope andsignificance.”

For Deutsche Telekom, the investment in OTE would provide access not just to Greece but also to the fastest-growing telecommunications market in Europe, the Balkans. In addition to fixed-line and mobile networks in Greece, OTE also owns mobile operators in Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia andAlbania.

“The two companies will complement each other in a big region,” said Anna Bischof, a spokeswoman for Deutsche Telekom. “Thats what makes the deal so lucrative forus.”

If an agreement is reached, the deal would still be subject to approval byParliament.

Labor unions fear that foreign administrators would decree sweeping job cuts and change work rules to turn former state-owned companies intomeritocracies.

“Its a type of phobia that is reflected not only in telecoms but across public life here,” Alogoskoufis said. “Its a state of mind that is not in tune with our times but fortunately reflects theminority.”

The protests, which were supported by left-leaning parties, capped a two-day strike by OTE employees demanding that the government resist foreign control ofOTE.

“Obviously,” said Alogoskoufis, who watched the protest from his fifth-floor office at the Finance Ministry, “there is no public euphoria over this deal. These types of reactions are strange if you consider that they come from a country whose people have always been involved in internationaltrade.”

LAS VEGAS — Network Access Control (NAC) technology may well be the next great evolution for enterprise networks, providing security and policy compliance.

But as NAC gains steam — shifting from its early-adopter phase to what many industry insiders see as increasingly must-have technology — both enterprises and vendors need to understand the risks they’re taking.

At stake is nothing less than billions of dollars in networking equipment, not to mention the overall security of the enterprise, according to Joel Snyder, the widely regarded NAC expert who ran the NAC Day program today here at the Interop conference.

“Are you ready to add another ‘priority one’ service to your network?” asked Snyder, a senior partner at Opus One, before a capacity crowd of several hundred NAC Day attendees. “What happens if the policy decision point goes down?”

The questions highlight the decision ahead of network admins considering NAC — and they risks they face by relying on the technology. Since NAC is by definition an access control technology, if its services are not operational, then access to the entire network can be threatened.

Consequently, if an enterprise deploys a NAC solution, it’s critical that it ensures that it has the proper redundancy and resiliency demanded by its particular network requirements, Snyder said.

It’s also unclear how much support there is for NAC for remote users, another element buyers should weigh.

“How will you do NAC in remote access and wireless situations?” Snyder asked. “What works inside the LAN should bring you value everywhere. [But] the reality is that some NAC products are only designed to work in one environment.”

Snyder added that when deploying NAC, the network needs to properly take all access methods into account.

In many ways, NAC is a disruptive technology, in that it fundamentally changes the network access paradigm. In the pre-NAC era, a user simply plugged their Ethernet cable into a jack to access the network.

[cob:Special_Report]With NAC, that’s not the case, as any user who plugs in is subjected to an audit to ensure policy compliance before they can proceed.

“When you add NAC to a network, it’s no longer a switching infrastructure — it’s a policy infrastructure,” Snyder said. “You plug something in and only maybe will it work.”

But with that paradigm change, network professionals must cope with another potential hurdle in deploying NAC: the issue of false positives, which could undermine the technology’s perceived usefulness within the enterprise.

But to Snyder, it’s important that the organization as a whole buys into the concept of NAC, seeing such difficulties as a necessary trade-off for network security.

“The goal of NAC is to get people on the network and not to keep devices off the network,” he said. “Make sure that your NAC vendor shows you a management interface, so when things go wrong, you understand what’s going wrong, so you can keep people happy.”

Of course, these problems all mean enterprises have a great deal on which to reflect when considering whether to implement NAC.

“What value does NAC bring to the organization?” Snyder asked, citing vendors’ traditional high-level answers, including compliance and security.

But he added that it’s difficult to provide actual metrics for calculating the return on investment (ROI) of any security technology.

“I can’t answer the question for you, but when you go figure out your deployment, you need to answer why your organization should spend time and money on NAC and what is the ROI going to be.”

Sun Microsystems is hoping to win over converts to its new NetBeans 6.0 IDE , which came out today.

Since its inception, NetBeans has been about Java. But this time, it’s different. NetBeans 6.0 is extending Sun’s IDE to other languages,including C/C++ , JavaScript and Ruby .

There’s more, too. Gregg Sporar, NetBeans Technology Evangelist, said NetBeans 6.0 will support the .

Sun’s support for Ruby is an expansion of its support via the JRuby effort, which is porting Ruby to Java.

“With JRuby there is a really great runtime available for Ruby and Ruby on Rails developers to use for deployment,” Sporar told InternetNews.com. “It allows them to get all the optimizations of the JVM for free. So we have a natural bridge in JRuby between the Ruby and Java worlds - we want to provide tools on that bridge as well.”

NetBeans 6.0 also includes a number of improvements in the Swing GUI Builder which was formerly known as Project Matisse. The GUI builder which debuted in «www.internetnews.com» is a drag and drop IDE GUI that simplifies layout with automatic layout suggestions for spacing and alignment. For NetBeans 6 Sporar noted that developers will notice the support Sun added for the new Swing Framework and for Beans Binding.

“Those frameworks, along with the enhancements to the NetBeans Swing GUI Builder, dramatically cut the time needed to get a basic Swing application up and running,” Sporar said.

Code completion has been improved in NetBeans 6 with what Sun refers to as ’smarter code completion’. Sporar explained that there are many enhancements that make NetBeans 6 ’smarter’.

“The main one being that the editor is smarter about the context when it displays the suggested code completions,” Sporar commented.

As an example, if a developer has this code:

List al = new

If you press Ctrl-Space at this point, it will offer you only the classes in the system which implements the given interface. And more importantly, it will automatically supply the generic variables.

With the NetBeans 6 release Sun is also hoping to sway users of other IDE’s including its arch-nemesis Eclipse. Sun has gone so far as to setup a testimonial site (http://www.netbeans.org/switch/realstories.html) where developers write their own reasons why they’ve switched.

Overall Sporar is confident that NetBeans 6 is a superior solution to the Eclipse IDE. Eclipse officials on the other regularly mention the fact that they believe «www.internetnews.com».

Plans are already underway for the next iteration of NetBeans which will be called NetBeans 6.1. The plan is to expand support for even more languages. ” We want to extend our support for other languages yet again, so PHP support will be a key deliverable for the 6.1 release,” Sporar said.

LAS VEGAS — Network Access Control (NAC) technology may well be the next great evolution for enterprise networks, providing security and policy compliance.

But as NAC gains steam — shifting from its early-adopter phase to what many industry insiders see as increasingly must-have technology — both enterprises and vendors need to understand the risks they’re taking.

At stake is nothing less than billions of dollars in networking equipment, not to mention the overall security of the enterprise, according to Joel Snyder, the widely regarded NAC expert who ran the NAC Day program today here at the Interop conference.

“Are you ready to add another ‘priority one’ service to your network?” asked Snyder, a senior partner at Opus One, before a capacity crowd of several hundred NAC Day attendees. “What happens if the policy decision point goes down?”

The questions highlight the decision ahead of network admins considering NAC — and they risks they face by relying on the technology. Since NAC is by definition an access control technology, if its services are not operational, then access to the entire network can be threatened.

Consequently, if an enterprise deploys a NAC solution, it’s critical that it ensures that it has the proper redundancy and resiliency demanded by its particular network requirements, Snyder said.

It’s also unclear how much support there is for NAC for remote users, another element buyers should weigh.

“How will you do NAC in remote access and wireless situations?” Snyder asked. “What works inside the LAN should bring you value everywhere. [But] the reality is that some NAC products are only designed to work in one environment.”

Snyder added that when deploying NAC, the network needs to properly take all access methods into account.

In many ways, NAC is a disruptive technology, in that it fundamentally changes the network access paradigm. In the pre-NAC era, a user simply plugged their Ethernet cable into a jack to access the network.

[cob:Special_Report]With NAC, that’s not the case, as any user who plugs in is subjected to an audit to ensure policy compliance before they can proceed.

“When you add NAC to a network, it’s no longer a switching infrastructure — it’s a policy infrastructure,” Snyder said. “You plug something in and only maybe will it work.”

But with that paradigm change, network professionals must cope with another potential hurdle in deploying NAC: the issue of false positives, which could undermine the technology’s perceived usefulness within the enterprise.

But to Snyder, it’s important that the organization as a whole buys into the concept of NAC, seeing such difficulties as a necessary trade-off for network security.

“The goal of NAC is to get people on the network and not to keep devices off the network,” he said. “Make sure that your NAC vendor shows you a management interface, so when things go wrong, you understand what’s going wrong, so you can keep people happy.”

Of course, these problems all mean enterprises have a great deal on which to reflect when considering whether to implement NAC.

“What value does NAC bring to the organization?” Snyder asked, citing vendors’ traditional high-level answers, including compliance and security.

But he added that it’s difficult to provide actual metrics for calculating the return on investment (ROI) of any security technology.

“I can’t answer the question for you, but when you go figure out your deployment, you need to answer why your organization should spend time and money on NAC and what is the ROI going to be.”