Canberra received an honourable mention in the December issue of IT magazine PC & Tech Authority, after journalist Zara Baxter calculated there was one IT job per 426 people in a month of job advertisements.

"If you're in Canberra, and you're not in IT, maybe it's time to think of a career change," she wrote in her analysis of Australia's best tech capital.

In evaluating IT employment, Baxter used her own measure to compare Australian cities, analysing a month of publicly available job advertisements. While she ultimately named Sydney as the top city in the employment category thanks to more expansive training opportunities, she found that Canberra had about an extra 350 IT jobs per person.

Baxter called her measure "rough and ready" but the scientist by training allowed for factors such as duplicate ads, eliminated jobs which were only tangentially IT, and used the same method for all cities.

"The data was comparative rather than absolute, but that 1/426 figure was pretty hard to resist including. The next best was Sydney, at 1/755," she wrote.

She looked at the four weeks of job ads just before the election, but in the coming months will be looking at how the data tracks over time.

While Canberra missed out on winning the employment category, it was judged as having the best fixed broadband coverage.

"Given Canberra's mix of lots of fast ADSL exchanges and good NBN capability, it wins our Fixed Broadband category," Baxter reported.

It seems fixed broadband is probably the better choice for Canberrans tossing up between fixed and mobile.

Canberra has the slowest 3G mobile download speeds of all the capital cities and beats only Hobart and Darwin when it comes to 4G mobile download speeds.

Brisbane, the best city for mobile internet, is more than twice as fast as Canberra for 4G downloads.