[LINK] Fibre gets nimble: small telcos weaving fiber web

[Richard Chirgwin]

Answer: "it depends".

Which areas, totalling 10% or 2% of the population, do you leave out?

If you want a quick-and-easy ready reckoner, you can assume that the 
Telstra mobile coverage map provides a reasonable facsimile of where 98% 
of the population lives.

Danny Yee wrote:
> On the other hand, we're _more_ urbanised than most other OECD
> countries, including the US.  So it's possible that getting 98%
> coverage for an NBN may be relatively harder here than in the US,
> even while getting 90% coverage is relatively easier.
>
> A programmer with the right data might be able to quantify this.
> How many 5km radius circles are needed to "cover" 90% of Australia's
> population?  
Depends: where are the centres of the circles? (I'm not being flippant, 
here, it makes a difference, as does your mention of radius below).
> How does that compare with other countries?  
I can answer that one more easily, since I ran the calculation once, 
properly. If you exclude the urban proportion of the Australian 
population and geography, we're incredibly dispersed; far, far more so 
than other countries.

92% of Australia's population lives in cities of more than 1 million 
people (dated 1997), using "statistical division" as the marker for a 
city. (No, I'm not going to go into critiques of Australia's statistical 
geography; if someone wants to argue that point, do it with the ABS.)

That's the highest concentration in the OECD, for a start. The US has 
seomwhere between 5 and ten people per square kilometre, cities of 1 
million-plus excluded; we have 0.21 people per sq km. France, urban 
populations excluded, runs between 25 and 30 people per sq km; South 
Korea close to 80.

RC
> What happens
> if we try to cover 95% or 99%?  Or we change the radius to reflect
> different technologies?
>   


> Danny.
>
> Richard Chirgwin wrote:
>   
>> Having spent some years wandering around Australia's population data, 
>> the things that impress me are (1) we're big and (2) we're empty. We 
>> have a handful of population agglomerations, and apart from that, we've 
>> got less than 0.2 people per square km (ie, subtract the cities and 
>> their landmass from the nation and its landmass, and that's what you get).
>>     
>  
>
>