North American Network Operators Group
Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical

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

  • From: Iljitsch van Beijnum
  • Date: Fri Aug 26 06:08:09 2005 
On 25-aug-2005, at 23:51, John Levine wrote:


and as people have
noted, the US is unusual both in being large and spread out.  Canada,
for example, has a gargantuan area, but just about everyone lives in
the 100 mile wide strip along the southern border and everyone else
lives in a few cities like Calgary.
Not exactly.

If you look at the US population density charts you see that the density goes down almost as a direct function of how far west you are. West of Dallas the country is pretty much empty. (There are a few high density pockets on the west coast, but even most of California is largely uninhabited.) The north-east is just as densely populated as countries such as Germany and Italy, the mid-west is similar to France and Spain.

But what matters much more than the average number of people per square (insert your favorite unit of length measurement) per region/ province/state/country is how close people live together. If there are 400 people in a 3218x3218 meter area (hey, that's four square miles!) it makes a big difference whether they all sit in a big apartment building right in the middle, or they all have their own house in the middle of a 150x150m (500x500ft) property.