[83814] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: ISP's In Uproar Over Verizon-MCI Merger
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Iljitsch van Beijnum)
Fri Aug 26 06:06:59 2005
In-Reply-To: <20050825215137.28298.qmail@xuxa.iecc.com>
Cc: NANOG list <nanog@nanog.org>
From: Iljitsch van Beijnum <iljitsch@muada.com>
Date: Fri, 26 Aug 2005 12:02:40 +0200
To: John Levine <johnl@iecc.com>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
On 25-aug-2005, at 23:51, John Levine wrote:
> and as people have
> noted, the US is unusual both in being large and spread out. Canada,
> for example, has a gargantuan area, but just about everyone lives in
> the 100 mile wide strip along the southern border and everyone else
> lives in a few cities like Calgary.
Not exactly.
If you look at the US population density charts you see that the
density goes down almost as a direct function of how far west you
are. West of Dallas the country is pretty much empty. (There are a
few high density pockets on the west coast, but even most of
California is largely uninhabited.) The north-east is just as densely
populated as countries such as Germany and Italy, the mid-west is
similar to France and Spain.
But what matters much more than the average number of people per
square (insert your favorite unit of length measurement) per region/
province/state/country is how close people live together. If there
are 400 people in a 3218x3218 meter area (hey, that's four square
miles!) it makes a big difference whether they all sit in a big
apartment building right in the middle, or they all have their own
house in the middle of a 150x150m (500x500ft) property.
