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Re: [funsec] Not so fast, broadband providers tell big users (fwd)

  • From: Joe Abley
  • Date: Tue Mar 13 23:21:31 2007


On 13-Mar-2007, at 18:36, [email protected] wrote:

Keeping this in perspective, the CIA Factbook says that Niue had a population
of 2,166 in July 2006, an area of 100 square miles (1.5 times the size of Wash DC),
and a highest elevation of a whole whopping 250 feet.

They used to have a bunch of trees that caused unwelcome attenuation the 2.4GHz band, but cyclone Heta took care of that little problem.

Meanwhile, Montgomery County, Virginia has some 85K or so people, 393
square miles, and more ridgelines and hollows than you can shake a stick at
(elevations from 1,300 to 3,700 feet inclusive).

Probably 70K of those people are crowded into about 40 square miles in 2 main
plateaus - those are easy to cover. The other 15K people scattered across
350 square miles of ridgelines and hollows are a lot harder to cover.

I posit that those 350 square miles are more remote, measured from "the point
the big fat cable lands at" (whatever landing station Niue has, and the 2 or 3
main telco CO's here), than any point on the island of Niue. At least measured
by criteria that matter to the guy engineering the towers.

This conversation has suddenly become very weird. I suggest you go and spend a year on Niue before you decide to make claims that anywhere in the US is as remote (and, for the record, there are no cables which land in Niue, fat or otherwise).

If there's a practical difference between Niue and Montgomery County with respect to network access, perhaps it's that Niue is home to someone who decided to build a network rather than just complain about it not being there (hi, Rich!). Do the 70k people that are "easy to cover" in Montgomery County have free wifi? If it's so easy, why not?


Joe