Deploying FttH in vast countries like the USA and Australia poses its own challenges compared with dense urban countries like the Netherlands. Often citied issues are the lower densities of housing cited as the main reason why a shared fiber architecture is unavoidable, and very low density rural areas which are deemed unaffordable.
The recently published architecture of the Australian FttH network suggests otherwise. More detailed data of real geographic distribution in the US states of Vermont and Minnesota (courtesy Tim Nulty) supports these doubts.
In Australia and in the USA the vast majority of the population is concentrated in urban areas.
In Australia 67 % of the population lives in the top 50 urban areas, if you include the major rural areas you can reach 85 % of the addresses in 1,5 % of the land.
A different dataset as provided by the FCC (distance between addresses) shows the same pattern for the USA: 90 % of the population lives close to each other in separate geographical area’s.
US census data of 2009 show that the top 350 “Metropolitan Statistical Areas” encompass almost 85 % of the population, quite similar to the Australian distribution.
Well, this data certainly does not point to any real problems with distances and length of fiber in FttH topologies, at least for the majority of the population.
But what about the other 15 %?
Tim Nulty has often pointed to the fact that homes in rural areas are also concentrated. Only a very few homes are really, really isolated. The concentration takes two forms.
First: a town centre, homes grouped together.
Secondly: homes strung along a road or a river bank.
As Tim says:
Vermont is the most “rural” state in the USA as measured by the % of the population that does NOT live in a “standard metropolitan statistical area”. SMSA’s are defined by the Census Bureau and are 50,000 pop or over. 75% of Vermont’s population of 620,000 does not live in any SMSA. (Indeed, Vermont has only 1 SMSA–the metropolitan area of Burlington. There is one other “urban” area of 17,000 and two of 11,000. Everything else is smaller). This is the definition of “rural” used by the US Dept of Agricultures “Rural Development Administration”.
There are 240,000 households. 75% of that = 160,000. There are approximately 12,500 miles of inhabited roads outside the SMSA. That gives a household density of 12.8 per linear mile of inhabited road. If one counts all premises (businesss, schools, institutions etc) this density would be close around 13.8.
Apparently these numbers are typical of the rural areas of the entire eastern part of the USA–i.e. east of the Mississippi and . Of course, in the larger, more urban states, a smaller % of the total population would live outside SMSA’s those parts of Washington and Oregon States that are rural and lie west of the Coastal range. But the non-SMSA areas, themselves, would have similar but slightly higher density characteristics to Vermont (i.e. 14 – 17 HH/mi rather than 12 – 14). A little over a 100 yards between homes……
The data strongly suggests that the cost of the FttH-local-loop in these semi-rural areas is not prohibitive at all.
The problem for any local initiative will be the backhaul from the local town centre to peering points. There will probably very little competition or only one supplier, giving them ample opportunity to squeeze the locals. Probably the best stimulus for local FttH in “rural” areas is a good affordable backhaul .
So yes, even in the USA it must be affordable to get over 90 % of the population on FttH and support the rest with wireless and satellite, like Australia.
