On 07/04/2016 21:52, Ralph Mowery wrote:
wrote in message
...

You have almost 260 people per square KM in UK so one fiber will serve
a bunch of people. We are a tad more spread out here. We have 30 per
sq/km overall and some states are more like 2-5 people per sq/km in
some western states. They are not stringing 20 miles of fiber to serve
30 or 40 households.

I understand, but having said that we have a lot of little villages with
only a handful of houses plus many farms out in the sticks.
Scotland and Wales have mountainous terrain.

Those are the 5% I imagine.
The US has not really put that much emphasis on getting fiber to the
home. The cable companies have no real incentive since coax meets the
needs of their primary business, TV and the telephone companies are
slow to expand "last mile" infrastructure when everyone is going
wireless.
I think the biggest thing we could do to unleash this business would
be to unbundle content from data and create competition in the data
business. It probably would result in data being metered by the
gigabyte but I don't see a huge problem with that. If they are selling
data, they will be trying to get you to use more so faster would be
better for them.
Competition would control prices. Right now, virtually all "cable"
operates as a monopoly.

They did install lots of fiber for our town that services only about 30,000
people or less. It was not done by the cabe company,but a fiber optics
company. Seems there are lots of unused fiber cables all over the US that
was installed,but not used. The fiber companies are jumping on those lines
for internet and TV.


Gotcha.

--
Bod