Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

'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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com