Hacker News Reader

Comment by sureaboutthis | Hacker News Reader

It would help if the USA was as small as France.

It is interesting that this argument is reflexively brought up every time someone mentions infrastructure.

It is not the absolute size that matters, it is density and clustering degrees. And there are some sparsely populated countries in Europe that manage to build infrastructure just fine.

Population density:

    USA: 35.0/km² (90.6/sq mi)
    Norway:  15.8/km² (40.9/sq mi)

That doesn't take population spread into consideration though; Norway has most people live in the south, like how most people in Canada live near the south / southeast and how there's huge empty / low population areas in the US compared to the more urbanized east and west coast.

62.7% of the US population lives in just 3.5% of land area: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2015/cb15-33....

The problem with arguments like that is that when you start involving the federal government in anything, the expectation is 100% coverage - not 62.7%.

It's worse than that when you account for the fact that rural votes count a lot more than urban votes: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-petrocelli/its-time-t....

France has approximately the same population as the Northeast megalopolis (the Boston–Washington Corridor) but the French population is spread out over three times the area.

And Metropolitan France has a density 116/km2, it's just a bit above Pennsylvania (110) or Ohio (109) and significantly below Florida (145).

To begin start in a metropolitan region and if it is profitable expand. The problem is something different: The incumbent providers are successful in preventing competition.

A lot of states are the same size or smaller than France and none of them has achieved to get the same internet price/quality so far. Not to mention the the US has a more concentrated population than most of Europe so it's even easier.

You can’t compare what a state can pay for with what a federal government can pay for - the difference in taxation alone makes that laughable...

It's probably unproductive to compare state vs federal budgets across different countries due to the drastically different funding modal different countries use.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com