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JPLPremium
join:2007-04-04
Downingtown, PA
kudos:1
1 edit | reply to sonicmerlin
Re: % of Population vs % of Geography said by sonicmerlin:said by MrMoody:said by BF69:Australia is the same size of he US with 1/10 the population. With most of it concentrated in relatively small areas along the coast. I'd like to know the minimum number of square miles it takes to cover 93% of the population. I bet Australia's number is much smaller than the US. Uhh...no. Australia's spending upwards of $5000/household to roll fiber out to 93% of its population. Compare that with Verizon's sub $1500/household FIOS project. The AU fiber is crisscrossing the entire country and reaching even remote areas, which was key to Labor gaining voter support for the project. Your cynicism is misplaced, and your arrogance is a bit annoying. Actually his cynicism is very well placed. The numbers you're quoting indicate that this would be attrociously expensive for the US. Let's ignore the fact that the US population centers are all over the place, vs. Australia. Let's assume they're equal. At $5000/household, Australia can do this (and let's assume that there will be no cost overruns, because Lord knows NO government program EVER overruns its cost) for a total expenditure of $11Billion. They can do it becaues they have a population of about 22Million. Which is roughly 7.5% of the US population.
Assuming that the cost per household of doing that here in the US is the same, it would cost us $1,500,000,000,000. BTW, your comparison with FiOS is very misplaced. The reason that Verizon can get it down to $1500/household is because they can afford to be selective about WHERE they run their fiber. There are some Verizon markets that will never get FiOS because it's too sparsely populated. Verizon keeps the cost down precisely because they only fiber up areas that are densely populated to begin with, with no fiber stringing across vast swaths of the fruited plains.
If you did this type of thing here in the US, you couldn't be selective like that. And there is no way in hell you keep the cost down to $1500/household if you have to run fiber to every small town in the country. Heck, in my mind $5000/household is unreasonable in light of that. | |
| said by JPL:Actually his cynicism is very well placed. The numbers you're quoting indicate that this would be attrociously expensive for the US. Let's ignore the fact that the US population centers are all over the place, vs. Australia. Let's assume they're equal. At $5000/household, Australia can do this (and let's assume that there will be no cost overruns, because Lord knows NO government program EVER overruns its cost) for a total expenditure of $11Billion. They can do it becaues they have a population of about 22Million. Which is roughly 7.5% of the US population. Assuming that the cost per household of doing that here in the US is the same, it would cost us $1,500,000,000,000. BTW, your comparison with FiOS is very misplaced. The reason that Verizon can get it down to $1500/household is because they can afford to be selective about WHERE they run their fiber. There are some Verizon markets that will never get FiOS because it's too sparsely populated. Verizon keeps the cost down precisely because they only fiber up areas that are densely populated to begin with, with no fiber stringing across vast swaths of the fruited plains. If you did this type of thing here in the US, you couldn't be selective like that. And there is no way in hell you keep the cost down to $1500/household if you have to run fiber to every small town in the country. Heck, in my mind $5000/household is unreasonable in light of that. FCC estimates put a fiber network at $300 billion. There are about 112 million households. Unlike Australia most rural households are directly adjacent to a main road. Only a very tiny % (5 or less) of homes are truly out in the middle of nowhere, and they could easily be serviced by wireless or satellite. | |
1 edit | I remember when I first heard about NBN 2-3 years ago, I did some paper napkin math on what it would take to do it here. And those numbers feel pretty accurate.
VZ FiOS showed a lot about large scale fiber deployments in the US. Particularly that it isn't as expensive as pundits would have you believe, and that costs come down.
If take into account the economies of scale that a country wide deployment would have, costs come down even further.
Also when you have a single piece of infrastructure, with everyone investing into, and competing on top of it, costs come down dramatically. There's good reason why there's only one electric, gas, water, sewer line into your home or business. It follows that there should be one, publicly owned, fiber line as well. | |
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