Contradicting earlier studies, conventional wisdom and politicians’ rhetoric, European researchers say that the Internet infrastructure of the United States is one of the world’s best and getting better.

So begins a story from today’s New York Times that offers some good news: The American Internet infrastructure is, apparently, just fine.

Not only just fine, actually, but among the best: The story cites the latest Global Information Technology Report as ranking the U.S. fourth on the worldwide list, behind Denmark, Sweden, and Switzerland (in that order).

The study was done by Insead, the business school near Paris, 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.

Despite the positive report, however, some remain skeptical.

“My gut feeling is that we don’t have the type of deployment you have abroad,” said David J. Farber, an Internet pioneer and a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. “If you are looking at broadband, we have a lot of problems. We are slow as molasses in deploying the next generation.”

Ultimately, though, although it’s just one report, it paints a much more positive picture than what we’ve been hearing lately. That’s good, of course, but it inevitably leads to claims that the information is flawed, since its conclusions are so much different than similar studies.

… 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 Co-operation and Development gave a conflicting message. The average advertised broadband download speed of 23 American 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.

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

… An O.E.C.D. economist acknowledged the nuances in taking into account government regulatory and related factors, and said 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 O.E.C.D. “In Europe we have adopted an unbundling strategy wholeheartedly.”