Albert Filice, Leah Yamshon and Mike Homnick contributed to this feature. Special thanks to OpenSignal, Semiocast, Ookla and the U.S. Census Bureau for contributing data and expertise to this feature.

What makes a “tech-savvy” or “tech-friendly” city? It may be a combination of public and private amenities that are available to those people who spend a significant amount of their time online, whether they’re at home or out and about. It could also mean the availability of such services at prices that don’t make it difficult to live the digital lifestyle. A tech-savvy city might be one where a significant part of the local economy is driven by information technology or by the production of the machines that allow people to create or access information.

TechHive developed a set of ten measurements to reveal the extent to which the country's largest cities possess those tech-friendly traits, or, put a different way, to show which cities are the most and least hospitable places to live for the tech-inclined.

Specifically, we looked at the number of IT jobs, the computer sciences graduate programs in the area, the availability of public Wi-Fi, the speed of 3G and 4G cellular services, the number of LTE wireless services to choose from, the speed and cost of home broadband service, the number of tweets that originate from each city, and the availability of city-government apps. (More about each of these measurements below.)

The most tech-friendly cities

After we had gathered and crunched all the numbers, San Jose/Silicon Valley, Atlanta, and Boston emerged as the most tech-friendly and tech-savvy cities in the land. The winner, San Jose/Silicon Valley, is not so surprising, since that Northern California area has long been considered ground zero for the computer industry. As such, personal technology is a deeply ingrained part of the local culture.

San Jose and the surrounding cities of Cupertino, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Santa Clara, and Sunnyvale have by far the largest proportion of computer pros of any place in the country. More than 52,000 IT jobs—or about 3.7 of them for every 100 residents—are based in the area. That number put San Jose/Silicon Valley well ahead of the city with the second-highest IT jobs per capita, Seattle, which has about 2.5 IT jobs for every 100 residents.

Atlanta made a surprisingly strong showing in our ranking, in part because of the speed of its 3G wireless service. The service available in the city clocked an average speed of 2.11 megabits per second, edging out San Jose/Silicon Valley by 0.01 mbps, or about 10 kilobits per second. The 4G wireless service in Atlanta isn’t bad either, averaging about 11.6 mbps from four competing wireless carriers.

Tweet City: Atlanta

Atlanta’s number two ranking was also driven by its residents' penchant for communicating in short 140-character blasts, otherwise known as tweeting. Paris-based research house Semiocast looked at an estimated 26 percent of total tweets (the ones that could be linked to a specific place) originating from the largest U.S. cities, and found that Atlanta was generating an average 1.5 percent of all tweets originating from large cities. That percentage may not sound like a lot; but when you look at it in relation to Atlanta’s modest population, you end up with a very high tweet-to-population ratio. Only Miami has more tweets per capita than Atlanta.

Third-place winner Boston is also somewhat tweet-happy. Bostonians generated only about 1.3 percent of the tweets originating from U.S. cities, but that equates to a tweets-per-capita number among the highest of any city we measured. Boston also rose in rank thanks to the high number of computer sciences masters programs available at the many universities in the area. We found 21 such programs, four more than in New York, which is a much bigger place.

New York came in sixth, just behind San Francisco, in our rankings. The Big Apple is home to a lot of IT jobs, more than in any other city, but after factoring in the huge population, we could clearly see that New York has far fewer IT jobs per capita than San Jose and Silicon Valley.

New Yorkers also reported impressive home broadband speeds of more than 17 mbps, putting New York above the 90th percentile of all the cities we studied. But those residents pay a lot for that broadband—almost $10 per megabit per second. Only people in Denver paid more.

It’s not terribly surprising that San Francisco has fewer IT jobs per capita (1.9 per every 100 residents) than San Jose/Silicon Valley. But it is a little surprising that the City by the Bay has fewer IT jobs per capita than Seattle (2.5 per 100 residents). The latter city's advantage might have something to do with the Microsoft jobs in the area. San Francisco, however, proved to have a few more jobs per capita than Austin, Texas, and Raleigh, North Carolina.

Also interesting is the finding that San Francisco—considered to be one of the most tech-savvy cities in the country—has lackluster wireless broadband speeds. Based on speed test data from OpenSignal, San Francisco’s average 3G speed is about 1.75 mbps, putting it well down the rankings for that measurement. The average 4G data speed isn't very impressive either, clocking in at just a bit higher than 11 mbps. And across the Bay Bridge in Oakland, we found the lowest 4G wireless speeds of any city in our study: 7.70 mbps. That’s less than half the average throughput we saw in cities such as Indianapolis, which reported an average 4G download speed higher than 15 mbps.

San Jose/Silicon Valley, Atlanta, Boston are America’s most ‘tech-friendly’ cities CITY WI-FI SOCIAL EMPLOYMENT GOVT HOME BROADBAND WIRELESS BROADBAND Public Wi-Fi hotspots per 100 people Daily tweets per 100 people IT jobs per 100 people IT graduate programs City apps Average download speed (mbps) Cost per mbps 3G average download speed (mbps) 4G average download speed (mbps) LTE services 1 San Jose/Silicon Valley, California 4.1 288 3.7 8 17 16.0 $5.93 2.1 10.2 3 2 Atlanta 3.0 446 1.0 1 0 15.7 $3.52 2.1 11.6 4 3 Boston 2.7 208 1.0 21 5 14.6 $6.04 1.9 8.6 2 4 Minneapolis 3.2 92 1.3 3 1 14.6 $3.48 1.4 n/a 2 5 San Francisco 2.7 152 1.9 6 1 12.6 $4.78 1.7 11.1 3 6 New York 1.3 85 0.6 17 10 17.3 $9.70 1.8 10.5 3 7 Austin, Texas 2.2 100 1.8 1 1 14.7 $3.98 1.9 9.5 3 8 Seattle 2.4 119 2.5 6 0 16.3 $4.53 1.8 9.4 2 9 Miami 1.4 500 0.2 4 1 15.6 $3.92 1.5 n/a 3 10 Dallas 4.1 108 0.6 8 0 11.1 $3.66 1.3 10.5 4 11 Raleigh, North Carolina 2.2 69 1.6 2 0 13.4 $3.51 1.7 11.3 2 12 Portland, Oregon 2.0 77 1.1 2 1 15.2 $9.14 1.7 14.7 2 13 Philadelphia 1.1 85 0.4 8 1 17.4 $4.50 1.4 10.3 4 14 Denver 1.8 65 1.0 9 1 15.0 $9.83 1.9 11.3 2 15 Nashville 1.9 88 0.6 0 1 16.8 $3.42 1.1 13.0 2 16 San Antonio 1.8 50 0.5 2 1 13.2 $4.60 1.3 11.4 4 17 Baltimore 1.4 107 0.6 9 1 13.0 $7.08 1.2 10.9 4 18 Houston 1.7 92 0.5 3 0 12.0 $3.56 1.2 11.1 4 19 Columbus, Ohio 2.0 77 1.1 0 1 13.3 $4.53 1.8 11.1 2 20 San Diego 1.0 54 1.4 2 1 13.7 $4.31 1.4 12.0 2

The least tech-friendly cities

What’s clear is that many cities in the United States still have a long way to go toward becoming “tech-friendly.” Web connections in many cities are too often scarce, slow, or overpriced. And city governments typically provide little in the way of apps or online services to make conducting business with the city (filing paperwork, reporting potholes, and the like) easier.

Many of the least tech-friendly cities in our study simply have been unable to attract technology product and services companies. In contrast, the most tech-friendly cities in the United States can point to tech and information services as a major part of their economies, and a tech-friendly culture follows.

El Paso, Texas, sits right on the U.S. border, just opposite Juarez, Mexico.

Case in point: El Paso, Texas, has almost no tech or IT jobs, according to the Census Bureau, and the measurements in our survey point to a city where technology is simply not a big part of the culture. If there is a demand for Wi-Fi service in the streets and coffee shops of El Paso, for example, it isn't being met: The city has less than one public hotspot for every 100 residents, the lowest availability rate we saw in our study. The home broadband service offered in El Paso averages about 10 mbps, a score that earned it a second-to-last ranking (behind Oakland, California) in that measurement.

Fresno, California, takes the honor of being almost the least tech-friendly U.S. city. Fresno, which tied with El Paso for the lowest number of public Wi-Fi hotspots, has only two IT jobs per 1000 people, and we could find no evidence of local-government apps at the city’s website.

El Paso, Fresno, Memphis rate as the least ‘tech-friendly’ U.S. cities CITY WI-FI SOCIAL EMPLOYMENT GOVT HOME BROADBAND WIRELESS BROADBAND Public Wi-Fi hotspots per 100 people Daily tweets per 100 people IT jobs per 100 people IT graduate programs City apps Average download speed (mbps) Cost per mbps 3G average download speed (mbps) 4G average download speed (mbps) LTE services 1 El Paso, Texas 0.8 23 0.2 0 0 10.2 $6.91 1.0 9.6 2 2 Fresno, California 0.8 35 0.2 1 0 13.7 $5.90 1.2 n/a 1 3 Memphis 1.1 73 0.3 0 0 14.4 $7.38 1.1 10.3 2 4 Oklahoma City 1.3 27 0.5 0 0 13.7 $5.08 1.0 10.5 2 5 Mesa, Arizona 0.9 n/a 0.6 0 1 14.6 $4.61 1.2 9.3 0 6 Tulsa 1.5 35 0.4 2 0 12.3 $7.25 1.3 n/a 2 7 Milwaukee 1.1 69 0.5 3 0 12.6 $5.14 1.0 10.1 2 8 Arlington, Virginia 0.9 69 0.6 0 1 11.1 $6.18 1.6 n/a 0 9 Long Beach, California 0.8 38 0.4 1 1 20.3 $4.82 1.1 8.2 0 10 Omaha 1.6 54 0.9 1 0 12.7 $4.26 0.7 n/a 2

Next page: The measurements defined, and more results