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Comment by skittles | Hacker News Reader

UK is smaller than Oregon. Oregon has a population of 3.9 million. UK has a population of 63.2 million. It is cheaper to get Internet to concentrations of people (more income per line).

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> UK is smaller than Oregon. Oregon has a population of 3.9 million. UK has a population of 63.2 million. It is cheaper to get Internet to concentrations of people (more income per line).

That's a bit misleading: 70% of Oregon's population is concentrated in the Willamette Valley, an area 1/5th the size of England and with a higher population density than Scotland. The US population is not evenly distributed: most of the population concentrates in very dense urban/suburban areas whereas most of the area (particularly in the west) is sparsely populated.[1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USA-2000-population-densi...

Sure, but the density of, say, NYC, Chicago, or SF, is pretty high. If density were the only factor, parts of the US would rank much more highly than they do now, would they not?

American Fiber is a corperate venture and doing work in the large cities can be expensive (especially New York) so maybe that has something to do with it.

I'm guessing doing stuff in London is pretty expensive too, so I doubt that reason is valid.

The UK isn't the only country with cheap broadband. Most of the US has a population density[0] higher than Finland(16/km^2) or Sweden(20/km^2), yet they also have low cost, high speed broadband(faster than the UK). So I think this argument is misleading

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_populati...

Yeah, Australians have it rough. ADSL2 here costs anywhere between $40-$100, those living a little further from the exchanges get speeds as low as 1.5mbps, and this is in Sydney. I can't imagine what it's like in country Australia. It's a real shame our government decided it's a good idea to CUT investment on broadband.

I was wondering where Australia was in the article graphs. Speed: crap. Price: stupid.

Don't forget the ridiculously low bandwidth caps.

Why are people in NYC and San Fransisco subsidising people in Oregon?

Shouldn't both of those cities have comparable prices to London, whereas Oregon should be $200+ per line to cover the cost of the long distances between homes?

Oregon has roughly the same population density as Sweden, which has some of the fastest and cheapest broadband connections available.

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