The Palo Alto Weekly exhaustively examines its city's and Silicon Valley's state of public Wi-Fi: The paper looks at the failures of various networks around the valley, the current state of Wi-Fi plans, and how a non-profit, WiFi101, is building (with a grant) a new effort that could be a model for how to offer free service for those without Internet access.
The Weekly also mentions Palo Alto considering fiber to the home, which the city incorrectly calls "Fiber to the Premise" (not "premises") in their request for proposal. Palo Alto installed an early city-owned fiber ring in the mid-1990s. That 40-mi. ring cost just $1.9m (in 1996 dollars) to build. The new effort would be entirely funded by partners, who would receive certain assets and contracts to anchor the project.