[bigiain]

And as a local, how sparse most of Australia is...

Comparing Sydney to San Francisco and London at the same zoom levels is fascinating (to me) and trying to find other areas on the globe as sparse as the dark bits of Australia is also fun...

[femto]

In a testament to how urbanised Australia is, on maximum zoom level I can put the square on Sydney's CBD and get 22,500 base stations, then without scrolling put the square on an area of bush and get 0 base stations.

It would be neat to see the gradient magnitude of the density of base stations, as it might be a measure of a country's degree of urbanization?

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Edit: Turns out it's not that hard to find areas of 0 base stations near major cities.

[bigiain]

I found it interesting scrolling around the globe with the "cursor" set to the zoom level where it contains all of Tasmania.

That gives me 160k entered over Sydney (Canberra up to Tamworth approximately), 124k over Melbourne, and places/areas of single digits are easy to find in the outback. It also gives me 300k entered over San Francisco, and 1.2million over London. (with easy to find spaces of zero in north Africa).

I'd like to see these figures compensated for population numbers. There's probably 7 million people in my "Sydney" footprint, I'd bet there's 10+ million in the SF/Bay Area footprint, and probably 30million in that "London and the entire south of the UK" footprint.

[realdense]

I live in Brisbane, Australia, the third most populous city. I can confirm that there are areas in Brisbane (not even "Greater Brisbane") that barely have mobile phone reception, such as Burbank on the eastern side.

[meetups323]

I can do the same at the zoom level where Sydney has 137,000 base stations. Nowhere in Europe has 0 at that level.