Back to top

FON Social Router: Density by Country

More on FON Routers By Country

So, following on my last post about Fonero growth by country and after reading about required density for "wifi roaming coverage" I started thinking about density of routers in my data.

Getting the Country Area Density

I picked up the population and land area by country from "GeoHive". It's really an awesome set of basic data for anyone who likes this kind of thing. So, using that and a little bit of Spread Sheet magic I came up with the following table that shows countries ordered from most dense to least dense FON coverage.

























































CountryPoints 8/21Area (KM2)KM^2/PointRouters Needed
Singapore916937.66,576
The Netherlands2,09141,52619.9397,389
Andorra2246821.34,480
South Korea3,56698,48027.6943,812
Belgium74630,52840.9292,933
Spain10,177504,78249.64,845,826
Switzerland81441,29050.7396,396
Israel24720,77084.1199,560
Italy3,852301,23078.22,893,981
United Kingdom2,975244,82082.32,352,193
Luxemburg292,58689.224,848
Taiwan42635,98084.5345,702
France5,654547,03096.85,256,775
Germany5,589357,02163.93,428,953
Denmark31243,094138.1414,252
Austria48883,870171.9806,341
Portugal58292,391158.7888,219
Ireland31270,280225.3675,782
Sweden1,863449,964241.54,326,791
Puerto Rico219,104433.587,559
Estonia8845,226513.9434,986
Finland508338,145665.63,252,447
USA12,4799,631,418771.892,641,762
Hungary10593,030886.0894,844
Greece149131,940885.51,269,114
Japan290377,8351302.93,634,483
El Salvador1321,0401618.5202,392
Norway201324,2201613.03,118,795
Poland182312,6851718.03,007,848
Dominican Republic2748,7301804.8468,756
Costa Rica2551,1002044.0491,557
Chile282756,9502684.27,281,577
Argentina8242,766,8903357.926,616,658
New Zealand65268,6804133.52,584,637
Uruguay35176,2205034.91,695,201
Mexico2781,972,5507095.518,975,653
Guatemala11108,8909899.11,047,511
Venezuela104912,0508769.78,773,817
Ecuador27283,56010502.22,727,820
Colombia971,138,91011741.310,956,217
Canada7039,984,67014202.996,051,822
Peru601,285,22021420.312,363,756
India1363,287,59024173.531,626,480
Turkey34780,58022958.27,509,146
Brazil3718,511,96522943.381,884,732
Australia1917,686,85040245.373,947,306
Paraguay9406,75045194.43,912,926
China Mainland1979,596,96048715.592,322,558
Russia7317,075,200233906.8164,263,351

Notes about the Data

The data is from August 21 and the last column in the data shows "Routers Needed" meaning the number of routers needed to achieve the "full density" of 25 routers/square mile (roughly 9.6/square Kilometer).

Conclusions

I'm not sure that there really are many conclusions you can draw from this. Singapore, the Netherlands, Andorra, and South Korea all have fairly high numbers and if you look at metro areas in those countries you can see that indeed walking down a street you'd have pretty good luck finding a FON hotspot. It's not particularly useful to know that the USA needs 92 million more routers to have nationwide coverage - as every cell phone provider will tell you there is lots of land in the US that you just don't need to bother covering! It would certainly be more interesting to know the density of certain metropolitan areas - I assume that some similar internal analysis went into the decision to target 25,000 free routers at Manhattan.

Category: 
People Involved: 
timeline: 

Comments

interresting... but not real

Hello,

It is an interresting calcul... but not real. for example in Russia/China/USA/ec.. (and even in France) there is lot of "deserts" I mean place with nobody... so we should not include this place to fon coverage network, as it is impossible to be cover by fon.

Better for your calculation take the km2 of urbanized land.

See you!

great idea for urbanized metrics

Yes - using km2 of urbanized land would be great. I'll have to search for that data as well. It's still not accurate becuase it ignores the fact that there may be routers spread in rural areas to give people access to free roaming as Linuses - but it's more accurate than the model I'm currently using.

Now I wonder where I can find that information - Lazyweb, any ideas?

great

I love this List. I believe it could be better, but its already a good help to understand. Tha knyou very muhc and sorry for my english. i come from brasil