NIMBYism at its finest. Cupertino did not allow cell phone towers for a very long time. The only one was an ATT tower on the top of Infinite Loop, right on the Sunnyvale border.

The people who would call their provider about bad cell coverage in their house are the same people that would go to city hall and demand that no cell towers be built in the city.

The ISPs have tried, but they get pushback from local residents whenever they try to install the necessary network boxes at intervals down the street. They had to go out of their way to hide cellular towers as streetlamps to get the 5G rollout to happen; I remember getting two or three notices for this (each from different telcos, so the one street corner has three streetlamps and two traffic lights on one corner).

I suspect if the droughts didn't make people get rid of their green grassy lawns homeowners would be more amenable to seeing green network boxes every few houses. It looks awful in the context of concrete sidewalks, though.

Palo Alto has its own municipal fiber program: https://www.cityofpaloalto.org/gov/depts/utl/business/progra...

Wonder if someone should take them up on it.

is the cellular deadspot on 101 just north of redwood city still there?