[waterlesscloud]

It costs as much to lay the fiber to one person as it does to 2000 in the same place, so a greater area is a disadvantage.

[jarospisak]

He said "on a per-head basis". On a per-head basis it's 5 times cheaper for Texas to lay fiber than for Finland (greatly simplifying, of course).

[waterlesscloud]

No.

If you bunch everyone up, it's cheaper per head.

But if you spread everyone out, it's more expensive per head, because on average you're laying more fiber per person.

[sirclueless]

I think you misread. Texas is 5 times more dense than Finland, and hence should be cheaper per head to lay fiber.

[waterlesscloud]

But it's not.

Finland has vast, vast areas with no one. Texas has people thinly spread throughout.

You can cover only parts of Finland, because people only live in parts of Finland. You have to cover pretty much all of Texas.

So, once again, the size of Texas is a negative factor.

The so-called "average density" is not the key factor here, the amount of fiber you have to lay to reach everyone is.

[zzuser]

The above is an invalid comparison. A better, more objective measure is linear population density.

Miles of roads in Texas: 152,054 miles Miles of roads in Finland: 65,617 miles ()

Population of Texas: 25,674,681 Population of Finland: 5,375,276

Linear population density of Texas: ~169 persons per miles of road Linear population density of Finland: ~82 persons per miles of road

Ergo, it is cheaper per head to provide wireline telecommunications services in Texas than in Finland, when building out to the whole population, as the linear population density is higher in Texas and most, if not all, permanent residences and business are accessible by road.

Sources: http://www.aaroads.com/texas/ http://www.stat.fi/tup/suomi90/lokakuu_en.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Finland http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas

() This road mileage does not include private roads in Finland. Including these roads would further lower the linear population density of Finland, but these roads were excluded from the calculation as the majority of the private roads are access roads to non-permanent recidency second homes and timer or agriculture roads.

[waterlesscloud]

This really isn't a good measure since roads will be denser in urban areas and less dense in rural areas, thus leading to exactly the same issues as directly using population density.

But beside that, the public road mileage for Texas is off by a factor of two. This DOT document lists 303,176 miles of public road in Texas. http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policy/ohim/hs04/htm/hm10.htm