[LINK] fibre distance issues?

[Adrian Chadd]

On Wed, Oct 24, 2007, Richard Chirgwin wrote:

> Too many people don't understand the scale of Australia. I just ran an 
> analysis for a conference presentation; some people think Bathurst is 
> fairly remote - but it's still in the upper 50% of the country in terms 
> of population density, as is pretty much 100% of Victoria and most of 
> NSW. The *really* empty bits have *at most* 0.08 individuals per square 
> kilometre. That is, eight people per 100 square kilometres.
> 
> Even limitless funds won't solve all the other problems associated with 
> threading fibre across huge distances to serve a few hundred people. So 
> 100% isn't going to happen, not ever. Just what the difference is 
> between 100% and the "real" limit, I don't know.

I'm sure the same was said about getting radio to the centre of Australia,
then running cross-country communications (I remember posters showing
the novel microwave station network that spanned east/west coast back
when I was a child); and I'm sure people thought running copper to peoples'
farms was also out of the question. I'm sure radio telecommunications is
still used out there; anyone done the numbers to see what it'd be like to
run radio-based internet+telephony out to farms over 100km+ last-mile links? :)

There's always a technical solution, as long as you're quite happy 
spending money. (Both on inadequate solutions as well as adequate solutions.)
The question is whether you're happy running _different_ solutions.




Adrian