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Comment by amazon_not | Hacker News Reader

What you really are interested in is linear density.

The only metric that matters when building a network is linear route miles of cable per subscriber needed to provide service.

There is a single metric you can use to approximate this for any country: people per mile of road. Every (on-grid) dwelling and business is on a street or a road, so if you put a fiber cable on every road or street, then you will pass every inhabitant in the country.

Sweden has 10 people per mile of road. The US has 30 people per mile of road.

Sweden simply does better, despite having to deploy more infrastructure to provide service.

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But neither the U.S. nor Sweden puts fiber on every road and street. Only 60% of Swedish households have fiber, and you can reach that figure without serving households outside of relatively dense towns.

Also, it looks like you're counting Sweden's vast unpaved road network, which makes up about 75% of its roads. I bet very few of the 60% of households with fiber live on an unpaved road. If you compare paved roads only, the U.S. and Sweden have the same linear density. And even then, it's much less expensive to connect two dense urban areas at either end of a 100 mile road than to serve sparse suburbs and exurbs along a 100 mile stretch of road.

> But neither the U.S. nor Sweden puts fiber on every road and street.

Firstly, Sweden pretty much intends to do so. The official goal is to bring at least 100 Mbps service to at least 90% of the population by 2020. Many municipalities/states have programs to build out fiber to everybody.

Sweden also already has a cable running to almost every premise, so in practice every road and every street is already passed. In 2011 xDSL covered 98,5% of the population and only 1100 households or businesses had no service or less than 1 Mbps service.

Secondly, it's an estimate, but it's a far better estimate than population density or any other single metric presented so far. It correlates with the linear miles of cable needed to pass all premises, which is the deciding factor in determining costs. It is also readily available and it measures compratively how hard it would be wire up a nation.

By this measure Sweden does far better, even having a need for more infrastructure per inhabitant to reach the same end result, i.e. broadband service for everyone.

You could cover 90% of the population of Sweden while only covering a small fraction of the roads. You could probably cover 98.5% of the population without covering much of the road network.

> You could cover 90% of the population of Sweden while only covering a small fraction of the roads.

Is this just a guess or do you have anything to back this up with?

> You could probably cover 98.5% of the population without covering much of the road network.

Here's a map of xDSL coverage: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/document/activities/cont/20110...

Let's see how you propose to cover that land area without also covering much of the road network.

Look at the HSPA map on page 5. Look at how little of the country you need to cover to hit 99.6% of the population.

That's an interesting observation. I wonder if that 99.6% figure is a mistake or if they use a different coverage definition for wireless, because the numbers don't add up.

Looking at the map, the northernmost county has barely any HSPA coverage. Nevertheless that county has a population of a quarter of a million inhabitants. To get 99.6% coverage, you'd still have to cover over 200 000 of those and everybody else in the country. That's clearly impossible as 100 000 inhabitants in that county live outside the ten largest "metro" areas.

There's just no way of not covering a lot of roads if if you aim for coverage in the high nineties with such a dispersed population.

> If you compare paved roads only, the U.S. and Sweden have the same linear density

That's a fair point.

> And even then, it's much less expensive to connect two dense urban areas at either end of a 100 mile road than to serve sparse suburbs and exurbs along a 100 mile stretch of road.

Not necessarily. Build costs in dense urban areas are high, but there are more subscribers. Suburbs and exurbs are cheaper to build per mile, but have less customers. It averages out fairly well.

> Sweden simply does better, despite having to deploy more infrastructure to provide service.

While this is probably true in an absolute sense, Sweden is also a much smaller, more homogeneous country than the U.S.; I don't think governments scale very well, so a small affluent country can likely be more nimble and innovative than a large affluent country (think startups vs enterprises).

I've seen this said many times, but I've never understood why people think this argument makes sense. If anything it's the opposite: the larger the country the larger the economies of scale. If there are diseconomies of scale then you can organise it at the state level or municipal level. Being a larger country simply gives you the option to organise it at a larger scale.

> If anything it's the opposite: the larger the country the larger the economies of scale.

Democracies aren't businesses. Getting some kind of consensus from a huge, diverse populace is hard. I think you end up with diseconomies of scale.

> If there are diseconomies of scale then you can organise it at the state level or municipal level

This requires the federal government to now maintain 50 distinct sets of policy, or delegate to regional bureaucrats. Both of these are diseconomies of scale.

These kinds of problems are hard to solve within a large enterprise with a hierarchical power structure; the United States is a much larger, more diverse entity with a distributed/consensus-driven power structure.

> Being a larger country simply gives you the option to organise it at a larger scale.

The argument that it is merely an option assumes that you are able to rationally choose the best option from the ones available. Not the case when we're talking about government. And the larger the government, the more political power is at stake, the less rational the decision making becomes.

The Op also pointed out that not all of Sweden is served by this municipal ownership arrangement. It may very well be the case that the Op has his or her own bias and Sweden is in fact not widely services this way.

Sweden does "x" better argument is getting tired. Sweden has a lot of negative outcomes as well from socializing so much. Our problem isn't that fact that internet isn't socialized its that its monopolized by 3-4 companies. The incentive to innovate at rapid rate is not there but rather keep the status quo. That being said Google and Verizon are two fiber companies that are leading innovation and forcing other companies to keep up or get left behind by leaving a vacuum of people that want that service. Thats how/why capitalism works. Over time fiber options will rise and we will be in a better position to have some options of our provider instead of being stuck with a state run service that could become crappier over time.

In the US, it's locally monopolized with a single provider.

Sometimes you can get DSL, but since Verizon employees get fired for fixing outages now, that will be gone soon.

Interesting, I had to go searching, but here's the info on the firing of Verizon employees:

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/10/verizo...

Meh, this is just union posturing to try to save obsolete jobs.

"The wireless home phone service, VoiceLink, is not a proper replacement for copper phone lines because it doesn’t work with security alarms, fax machines, medical devices such as pacemakers that require telephone monitoring, and other services, the union said."

Really? Verizon should be maintaining and repairing obsolete infrastructure so people can keep using fax machines? GMAFB.

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