Telepocalypse

Suburban spread

The talk at WTF by George Gilder on Korea has set me thinking about structural causes of broadband uptake. The south of Kansas City when I am sat now is one vast suburban sprawl. Fifteen years ago, 95th Street was the edge of town. Now when we take our daughter swimming we head down to 159th Street. The few fields left down there have “For Sale” signs on them awaiting development.

I’m just wondering if the US appetite for consuming land is a leading cause of the relatively low uptake of broadband. The US is clearly no broadband backwater, but given its riches and economic dynamisn, you would expect it to be doing better. All that sprawl just increases the mileage the cables and fibers need to be laid over. And there’s an R^2 effect. Make those houses 50% bigger in each direction, and you’re only getting 45% of the density of properties per square mile. That makes broadband wireless more expensive to deploy.

Even worse, VDSL can’t deliver high speeds over long distances of copper wire without lots of local repeaters. And the uplinks of wireless connections are pretty sensitive to distance from the central tower.

So perhaps the future of American suburbia will remain two kids, an SUV and an expensive trickle of data for the forseeable future.

At least they won’t have the problems seen in the UK where cable TV laying got into trouble because so many urban pavements [=sidewalks] have trees embedded in them, and the cable TV folks where cutting their roots. Here there aren’t many sidewalks. Only freaks and deadbeats walk.

At there’s no danger of a hill blocking the line-of-sight view of a cell tower in Kansas…