Not to mention NL is like a blip on the world map as compared to AU on size..:)

Au is only slightly smaller than the USA with 25.7 million people vs just California’s 39.24 and the Netherlands have 17.53 million — but bear in mind Australia is 186 times the size of the NDs. So it’s not surprising service is so good — the density of population makes broadband extremely profitable.

People forget. The numbers tell a really great story.

The population density is a correlated number, but it's not necessarily an issue, which makes this into one of my pet peeves.

You could have a gigantic nation which is completely centralized into one city, giving you a super low population density on paper.

It's not the case in any of your example, so not really an issue here. Nonetheless...

For that matter, Australia as a whole--like some other low density areas like Alaska--actually has fairly concentrated population centers.

Yes, absolutely true. I think there’s something like 8M people just in NSW and the majority are Sydney.

Only trying to provide context for the economics of density in places like Singapore and the a Netherlands, not necessarily prove the opposite use case. I just wanted to highlight a contrasting factor that is very important for fiber and other high speed service viability. There are many others!

These criticisms are totally valid.

Australia's 86% urbanised - so about twice as much "non-urban". Of course the costs to service those areas are likely higher, but it'd be hidden in cross-subsidies. It seems it would be much better for the government to transparently pay the subsidy for non-economic areas (which is worth definitely worth paying!) rather than hide it in the overall NBN pricing.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/260498/degree-of-urbaniz...