Estimating the cost of a telecommunications network using the fractal structure of the human population distribution

Results are presented which exploit the strong scale-invariant structure present in the spatial distributions of the populations of Great Britain and the United States to estimate the cost of star networks to serve these populations. The costs of the network components are modelled as affine functions of the capacities of the components. The main application for this work is to assist in making decisions in the design and choice of network components on a national scale