[LINK] The 2%

[Richard Chirgwin]

George,

I don't think this has been published anywhere; there is, however, a 
list of under-served areas in an Excel spreadsheet published by the 
Department ... Googling should provide the link.

What shows as "98% of the population" on a map depends on your data 
sources, and on how you determine the cutoff.

I presume that the Department used Telstra exchanges as one data source, 
since you can purchase these maps (from MapInfo; costs a bomb). For the 
other half of the population equation, you would use ABS Census maps ... 
I can't think where else you could get a sufficiently accurate measure 
of where people live -- unless you used the electoral roll. But 
geocoding ten million addresses would be slow and expensive!

So it's a matter of getting the source data, analysing distances, and 
finally deciding what your cut-off criteria are. Then brace yourself for 
lots of dissatisfaction - remember that 2% of the population is 400,000 
people, perfectly enough to make lots of noise about being left out; and 
inevitably, some people at the fringes will be left out, even though 
their circumstances and remoteness are nearly identical to people who 
are "in".

RC

George Bray wrote:
> Gday Linkers,
>
> I'm after some information about how the 98%/2% figure is arrived at
> for describing the expected coverage of the NBN. I presume it's based
> on the percentage of population living/working a certain distance from
> an exchange, or town centre.
>
> Has anyone seen an official document where this statistic is defined?
>
> thanks in advance,
> George
>