Recent claims that broadband deployments in the UK, USA, New Zealand and France should be aped by Australia have not stood up to scrutiny. Credit: Rodolfo Clix, file photo (www.sxc.hu)

When an argument breaks out over Australia's NBN relative to other countries, questions of population density inevitably become a factor.

The key point of contention is this: to what extent does Australia's geography drive up the cost of the NBN? One side will answer "plenty - we have on average two people per square kilometer". The other side will point out that most Australians live in just a handful of cities, where population density is high.

Which side is right?

The answer falls somewhere in between. The major cities - Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth and Canberra - held 68.4 per cent of the Australian population in 2008 (according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics' Social Trends publication), and "inner regional" areas (including Hobart) add another 19.7 percent.

However, the NBN is taking fibre to 93 per cent of the population - which means it has to reach beyond those areas. Here's a visualization which doesn't have anything to do with the NBN:

I've organized this map by population density. It shows areas in Australia that have more than 117 people per square kilometer - which gets you just over 85 per cent of the population.

Why 117 people per square kilometer? Because that is the latest average population density in France, according to its National Institute of Statistics and Economics Studies, INSEE - and since journalists and Malcolm Turnbull are arguing over its applicability for comparison, it's handy for this purpose.

Even for a network to serve 85 per cent of the population, it needs to spread a long way beyond the big cities. In France, you can reach 85 per cent of the population without leaving the urban areas - because France is more urbanized than Australia.

These considerations put the landmass question in perspective. In the image below, I've reprojected France onto Australia. As you can see, the entire 63.5 million (2009 Census) people in France would fit in NSW, and nearly 54 million would be in cities (probably more dense than Sydney).

Also consider this: in France in 2010, there were at least 30 cities with a population of more than 300,000. New South Wales had Sydney.

All of these give France a considerable cost advantage in deploying any kind of fixed telecommunications network, but there's one other point to make.

As I discussed here, Australia's love of the freestanding home puts a premium on a network rollout. Just like the Swedes, the French live in apartments, with just 44 per cent of its population in freestanding houses, versus 85 per cent of Australians.

Depending on your position on the NBN, this leads to two conclusions: (a) A rollout in Australia will be far more expensive per-person than in France; or (b) Our geography prohibits from rolling out Fibre-to-the-Home. However, it's clear that the rollout costs in France do not provide a case study for Australia.