[83815] 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 06:24:52 2005
In-Reply-To: <DA02C312-CFFF-4894-86B3-FE11164540D3@covisp.net>
Cc: NANOG list <nanog@merit.edu>
From: Iljitsch van Beijnum <iljitsch@muada.com>
Date: Fri, 26 Aug 2005 12:23:34 +0200
To: Lewis Butler <lbutler@covisp.net>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
On 26-aug-2005, at 2:56, Lewis Butler wrote:
> I didn't say anything about population density. I said the
> countries are all very very small (in terms of area) with the
> exception of Canada,
> The fact is it is easier for a country like South Korea or The
> Netherlands to string fiber all over the entire country because
> they don't need to lay a few millions of miles of fiber to do so.
That argument removes one variable from the equation: the number of
customers. Sure, it's much cheapter to lay down 50 km of fiber than
500, but if you get 10 times the number of customers (all things
being equal, including population density, then obviously your number
of customers would be 10 times higher for a 10 times bigger area) and
because of economies of scale it's even cheaper.
And you also assume that you need fiber for broadband but not for
smallband. While I'm sure there are still a few places that use
telephony trunks that are unsuitable for broadband, the majority of
those trunks have been over fiber for a long time, so the fiber is
already there in most cases.
> Holland: 41 Thousand km sq, (and 7K of that is water), so call it
> 34K. Sure, the population is pretty evenly spread, but the area is
> a postage stamp compared to the US.
It seems that way when you look at the map, but if you're digging
trenches to put in fiber it suddenly doesn't seem quite as small.
The main difference between the Netherlands and most other countries
is that it doesn't have very large cities (although the four major
ones are close together so you could consider them a single big ~3M
one). And unlike bigger countries, it doesn't have large open spaces.
There are open spaces, but you can't walk for more than a few hours
or drive for more than 15 minutes before you reach a small town.
