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Re: ISP's In Uproar Over Verizon-MCI Merger

  • From: Lewis Butler
  • Date: Thu Aug 25 20:57:34 2005 
On 24 Aug 2005, at 18:38 , Joe Abley wrote:


On 24-Aug-2005, at 19:16, Lewis Butler wrote:
And what does every country ahead of the US have in common? Tiny populations.

And waht does every country but one have in common? Very small area. The US has states taht are larger than 10 of the 11 countries ahed of use, COMBINED.

(populations; population densities in people per square km, pasted from <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ List_of_countries_by_population_density>)

South Korea 48M; 491
Netherlands 16M; 395
Denmark 5M; 126
Iceland 0.3M; 2
Canada 33M; 3
Switzerland 7M; 181
Belgium 10M; 339
Japan 128M; 337
Finland 5M; 15
Norway 5M; 14
Sweden 9M; 20
United States 296M; 30

So, of the 11 countries that the OECD thinks have greater broadband penetration than the USA, 6 are more densely-populated than the USA and 5 are not.

Not that this necessarily means anything, but I thought your sentiments above could do with some numbers. I don't see a strong correlation between broadband penetration and population density here.
I didn't say anything about population density. I said the countries are all very very small (in terms of area) with the exception of Canada, but even with Canada something like 90% of the population lives within 150 miles (or is it 200? 200 seems more reasonable, but 150 sticks in my mind) of the US border or something silly like that. The fact is it is easier for a country like South Korea or The Netherlands to string fiber all over the entire country because they don't need to lay a few millions of miles of fiber to do so. And even with Canada, the population is mostly in a relatively narrow band along the US border. How much broadband penetration is there in the Yukon, for example? Echo Lake?

US area: 9.5 million km sq, with the large population centers at all four extremes and ~25 cities with more than 2 million GMSA populations.

South Korea: 100 Thousand km sq. nearly half the population lives in ONE city (20 million in Seoul Metro Area) and there are only 2 other cities over 2 million in population (three, but one is part of Seoul's Metro Area)

Holland: 41 Thousand km sq, (and 7K of that is water), so call it 34K. Sure, the population is pretty evenly spread, but the area is a postage stamp compared to the US.

Iceland: 100 km sq, population of nearly 300,000. But 2 out of 3 people live in Reykjavik Metro Area. Provide broadband to Reykjavik and you have 66% penetration.


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Lewis Butler, Owner Covisp.net
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