Re:Verizon's video app gets special data privileges
by okasaki on Saturday February 06, 2016 @03:31PM
(#11049670)
People per km^2:
Europe: 32 (edit: wrong)
US: 35
Re:Verizon's video app gets special data privileges
by ghaff on Saturday February 06, 2016 @03:48PM
(#11049761)
Not sure where you get that number for Europe. According to Wikipedia [1] it has a population density of about 73/km^2. European Russia also brings that number down a bit because it has a population density comparable to the US.
Re:Verizon's video app gets special data privileges
by okasaki on Saturday February 06, 2016 @04:36PM
(#11050032)
Oh my mistake, I just googled it and didn't read the page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_and_population_of_Europea...
Seems they included all of Russia too.
Re:Verizon's video app gets special data privileges
by ghaff on Saturday February 06, 2016 @04:55PM
(#11050127)
I think the figures for Russia specifically are for the whole country. But I read the population density for Europe as a whole including only European Russia. (Including all of Russia in the total would skew the result enormously as Asian Russia is bigger than all of Europe and only has a population density of about 3/km^2--and probably has pretty spotty cell phone reception:-).)
The carriers here can't price based on where you live, because people travel (and could easily fudge their addresses). So what happens is the people who live in cities end up subsidizing the infrastructure for people who live in suburban or rural areas.
We do have smaller carriers (T-Mobile and Sprint) that have much less coverage in non-urban areas, and those carriers are much cheaper. Google actually combines those two carriers into Project Fi, which costs much less than $30/GB (I think it's $10).