It's not citywide yet, but it's a great effort for an after-school project: The Rochester After School Academy (RASA) is building a network with Wi-Fi nodes attached to 17 utility poles; the network could expand to 35 in this early phase. The student-staffed Rochester Digital Ripple will operate the network. The city of Rochester helped RASA negotiate access to utility poles, and will donate 35 computers for use at a community center.
The negotiations for these poles took--a year! Can I keep reiterating that the hand that rocks the utility pole rocks the world? Yikes. The efforts in this pilot project are part of the groundwork for plans for a citywide network. [link via Mike Thomas]
Since at least one centrally located utility pole is within cat5e range of at least 20 residences why not add wired 1 GigE access at the central pole to the wireless and interconnect the switches/wifi routers with Cat5e $.10 ft) or fibre drop cable (12 strand .20 a foot). I figure a cost of $20-$40 per subscriber for the wired/wireless network and $100 a wired drop.