ISP's In Uproar Over Verizon-MCI Merger

Fri Aug 26 10:02:40 UTC 2005

On 25-aug-2005, at 23:51, John Levine wrote:

> and as people have
> noted, the US is unusual both in being large and spread out.  Canada,
> for example, has a gargantuan area, but just about everyone lives in
> the 100 mile wide strip along the southern border and everyone else
> lives in a few cities like Calgary.

Not exactly.

If you look at the US population density charts you see that the  
density goes down almost as a direct function of how far west you  
are. West of Dallas the country is pretty much empty. (There are a  
few high density pockets on the west coast, but even most of  
California is largely uninhabited.) The north-east is just as densely  
populated as countries such as Germany and Italy, the mid-west is  
similar to France and Spain.

But what matters much more than the average number of people per  
square (insert your favorite unit of length measurement) per region/ 
province/state/country is how close people live together. If there  
are 400 people in a 3218x3218 meter area (hey, that's four square  
miles!) it makes a big difference whether they all sit in a big  
apartment building right in the middle, or they all have their own  
house in the middle of a 150x150m (500x500ft) property.