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Comment by xigency | Hacker News Reader

> A more reasonable comparison would be between Sweden and ... New Jersey

Except that Sweden is 20 times larger than New Jersey in area. The continental US is 18 times larger than Sweden, so it is actually a better (if terrible) comparison geographically.

Maybe in your argument you should compare Sweden with Michigan, Arizona, New Mexico, California, Nevada, or Minnesota instead of New Jersey, which each have at least half the area of Sweden with varying population density.

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I'm not sure you can just look at just total population and total land area. The pattern of development in Europe is very different. I just got back from Munich. You go 15 minutes outside the city and it's farmland! In the U.S., it's low-density suburbs for hours in every direction outside a major city.

Incidentally, I didn't get LTE service in the farmland between Munich and the airport. That would be quite unusual in the U.S.

'That would be quite unusual in the U.S.'

...depending on your provider. try driving around in the sticks of Maryland just 20 minutes outside Baltimore, good luck getting EDGE on tmo!

And that is why I don't use tmo. :) I bet that your experience would be different with Verizon, AT&T, or maybe even Sprint.

but that hardly makes it an unusual proposition - tmo is the 3rd largest network.

Look at Google maps around say Blacksburg VA or Charleston WV. Which are both is city, city, city, forest. Which is fairly common across much of the US. The eastern seabord being basically one big city is very much an exception not the rule. The US has ~1/3 it's population in ~1/20th of it's land.

The difference is that Blacksburg and Charleston have 50,000 people, while Munich has 1.5 million people.

Las Vegas has 600,000 people and the same thing. While less extreme, Chicago has over 2.5 million people and farmland is very close by.

And there's farmland in Maryland 20 miles from the White House, despite the DC metro area having 6 million people. Although, in some directions the suburban sprawl does extend much further (30-35 miles in Virginia, and twice that if you draw a line through to the far side of Baltimore).

The farmland is over 7 million people away from the city.

Mocking the wounded-pride-per-pound calculation, are we? Have a upvote for that.

Sweden is actually one of the best European examples since its population density and GDP are both lower than the US ones (yet still comparable).

Sweden is also the country that people always pick, when they want to illustrate that Europe has better broadband, but as you say, it's one of the best examples.

Take Denmark next to Sweden, while still better than the US, for the most part, the broadband roll out is much different. A single phone company (TDC/YouSee) owns the phone network, but they are force to lease their lines to competitors. TDC more or less dictate the price for renting, it just has to be "reasonable". The result is that a 20Mb DSL line cost the same from all providers. Cable companies have been force to open their networks this year, until then they had monopolies in individual areas. Fiber is being rolled out, but slowly and at great cost to the electric companies (that more or less own the fiber networks). This may sound great overall, but rural areas aren't getting nearly the level of connectivity that they would have gotten in Sweden. There are still plenty of place that are lucky to get 5Mbit, and Denmark is a very small country. I can't imagine the cost of rolling out just 10Mbit to 90% of the US customers.

These arguments are now decades old and unresolvable since everyone is trying to extract a meaningful comparison from a single dimension of a complicated metric. I'm pretty over them. Can we call a halt?

If you want to use a single metric, why not use people per mile of road?

This correlates well with the only network metric that matters, linear route miles of cable per subscriber needed to provide service. Every (on-grid) dwelling and business is on a street or a road, so if you put a fiber cable on every road or street, then you will pass every inhabitant in the country.

Sweden has 10 people per mile of road. The US has 30 people per mile of road.

Sweden simply does better, despite having to deploy more infrastructure to provide service.

That metric works great if you have 100% penetration.

But what if a place doesn't have service on a large portion of roads? I doubt that is particularly true for this comparison, but the metric probably shouldn't reward a place with more unserved areas.

Sweden had 98,5% xDSL coverage in 2011 and aims for 90% coverage of 100 Mbps service by 2020.

Isn't people/mile still incorrect because you basically have islands of large dense cities with roads between them that nobody lives on.

People still live in the countryside. Rural areas aren't some uninhabited wilderness.

If your aim is to provide broadband to all, you'll have to build there too. Sweden aims to do 100 Mbps to 90% of the population by 2020. Can't do that by just covering urban areas.

Apparently you can get to 86% by just covering urban areas.

http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS

Rural areas aren't some uninhabited wilderness

Try driving through Wyoming some time (on a highway!). You can easy drive for an hour or two and there is nothing but BLM (gov't) land all around you. No one lives there.

It can still be the case that Sweden is easier to serve than New Jersey, it depends on how the people are arranged within, not on the average density.

As an absurd example, you can serve 40% of the population of Alaska by establishing service in Anchorage, which is roughly 0.1% of Alaska by area.

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=ratio+of+land+area+of+...

Ah yes, the land area would be a better comparison than total area.

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=ratio+of+land+area+of+...

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