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You're much better off figuring out a wireless solution. Building out and maintaining a network of underground cables in an established city just sounds like a

• xhrpost 14y ago
  I know what you mean, and there has been wireless successful wireless startups so there is a case for it. The big issue though is bandwidth. With ubiquitous wifi hardware (thus cheap), you might be able to push 100Mbps (rough guess, I'm not sure how multi-antenna systems work for the 300 limit, I would assume 1 antenna to a person's house though). Which would be great but you're not going to get it unless you're standing next to the base station. You have to go through thousands of feet of air and then share what's left with everyone else using that AP. How many people would share an AP? Assuming 4 to a tower, easily 100? During peak times of day, I doubt you could get WiFi to deliver speeds that rival current offerings and it may be difficult to even match them (my local WiFi provider just recently broke 15Mbps for their top business tier at a much higher price than local cable). You also need to physically install and maintain antenna's on everyone's roof (how would this work at apartments?) and hope there's no buildings in line of sight to the tower. Both of which would be highly vulnerable to weather (you put lightning suppressors on those people's antennas and ran a grounding wire to the earth right?). TL;DR: I don't think wifi is any less of a nightmare (purely hypothesis though, I don't have experience with either in public infrastructure) but we see it more simply because initial cost of deployment is less.