No. of Recommendations: 5
There are parking meters all over the place which run on electricity (credit card readers, etc.) so obviously there is power available at many places under the sidewalks, and putting new power lines in place is trivial with an auger boring ditch witch. (They’re using it to install new fiber in our neighborhood just this week.)
I've been following the efforts of Sonic (regional internet provider) in rolling out their own fiber network in the SF Bay Area for the last decade+. It may be physically trivial, but it is anything but in terms of logistics and, especially, permitting. Constant battles, differing in every city and sometimes down to the block level, to get permission for microtrenching, use of overhead poles, access to property, etc. I've been waiting through 6 years of promises that they'll run fiber Real Soon Now to my house and will not see it happen before I move out of the area in a few months.
It is hard to imagine that running new high power infrastructure widely along city streets will suffer fewer obstacles than running innocuous optical fiber cables, short of highly unlikely state- or federal-level legislation to force cities to go along.
