3 ms·
Speaking of geography, .au has at least some copper mines, and they're a reasonably advanced nation, so they can likely supply locally made copper cables, which
by VLM 13y ago
Speaking of geography, .au has at least some copper mines, and they're a reasonably advanced nation, so they can likely supply locally made copper cables, which might be more economic than shipping fiber and fiber gear from "somewhere" to .au. Maybe it would be more economical to export large diameter power cables to "somewhere" while importing fiber, but its not a total no-brainer and requires at least some research to determine the optimum.
.so doesn't have much for resources other than pirates and hungry people, so if they're going to have to import everything, may as well be the new stuff.
Another way to look at .au vs .so is .au is very sparsely populated other than coasts so "most people" will likely end up using wireless for everything, and copper only in unusual areas, and perhaps not so in .so where a very substantial fiber investment might be required to pepper the entire country with wireless towers.
Inherently fiber "should be" much cheaper tech that copper, but due to existing infrastructure and historical economic conditions, its currently applied the other way around, so expensive fiber is for big cities and cell towers, but copper is for providing DSL to that cattle ranch 100 miles from civilization. If .so only serves the rich in the big cities, they have no use for copper to feed the rural poor who won't be getting service, as a theoretical example.
- vacri 13y agoAnother way to look at .au vs .so is .au is very sparsely populated other than coasts so "most people" will likely end up using wireless for everything, and copper only in unusual areas Australia has a 90% urbanisation rate, which is one of the highest of all non-city-state nations[1], though our cities are quite spread out. It's a total myth that we're all comfortable in the Outback, one that most of us seem to believe ourselves. We're suburbanites and urbanites, as a rule of thumb. Regarding the costs, laying new fiber is more expensive than not laying new copper, but the copper circuits we have are so old that maintenance costs are ballooning. There's not really a serious cost argument for or against the NBN, it's really about politics. copper is for providing DSL to that cattle ranch 100 miles from civilization DSL doesn't stretch that far, by an order of magnitude (perhaps two orders) :) [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_by_country http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_by_country
- dfc 13y ago> which is one of the highest of all non-city-state nations This is somewhat misleading. One of the "highest" non-city-state and non-micro-island nations behind South Korea, Japan, Argentina, Iceland, Israel, Uruguay, Venezeula, Belgium, Kuwait, Qatar and tied with Chile.
- vacri 13y agoSpeaking of being misleading, are you saying that being equal 11th of nearly 200 such countries doesn't count as being 'one of the highest'? Including all nations, it only drops to 17th - still in the top 10%.
- dfc 13y agoYes, I think that being in the top 5% is a requirement for being one of the highest. To be honest I would prefer to restrict "one of the highest" to the top 2.3%
- vacri 13y agoTop 2.3% it is, then. However, the central theme of my point was that everyone (including ourselves) sees us as a rural nation, focusing on the outback, when we're actually a society of [sub]urbanites, despite the landmass.