On Wed, Aug 24, 2005 at 07:15:44PM -0600, Sean Figgins wrote:
On Wed, 24 Aug 2005, Joe Abley wrote:
So, of the 11 countries that the OECD thinks have greater broadband penetration than the USA, 6 are more densely-populated than the USA and 5 are not.
I wonder how they figure population density... Is it just a matter of land area divided by the number of residents, or something more complex. I think that it would need to be much more complex than that for a country that has such diversity as the US or Canada. Smaller countries, such as European coundties, or Japan may be able to get by with straight averages, but I still think that it would be better.
And what about penetration? Is this a matter of homes passed, or actual subscribers? Perhaps it would be a better measure to percentage of homes that are capible of having broadband access.
I once spoke to a construction manager at comcast for their network buildouts. With my local township, they need to have 20 homes per linear mile along the route to justify a build. While my street has 11 homes, and 3 adjacent (where my private road meets the main road) there are an insufficent number of homes along the route to reach here. They also won't go more than 150' out of the way/on your property due to concern about signal loss. Something that is helping these network builds is that some people are now refusing to buy from builders if there is no broadband at their homes, so the builders are approaching the cable companies (and possibly the telephone company too) for network expansion. I've considered running my own conduit/fiber loop on the street with my other neighbors and providing that as a carrot to lower the cost for their network builds. I've been meaning to call the construction manager back and ask if this would get them to reconsider as well as a few of the nearby projects that will likely bring their plant slightly closer to me. - jared -- Jared Mauch | pgp key available via finger from jared@puck.nether.net clue++; | http://puck.nether.net/~jared/ My statements are only mine.