Indeed, our community had to fight that, IIRC, we had to vote to overturn those bans, but did eventually get it through. They also did a bunch of advertising saying "We have so many problems like traffic, shouldn't the money be spent there instead?", but the money that was used to build the network was NOT money the city could use for anything else, it was a bond specifically for FTTH initiative.

Buncha jerks.

I was in one of the earlier roll-outs and the change was amazing! It actually did happen during the pandemic, and at one point we had 4 people doing video calls from the house and Xfinity's fastest service couldn't keep up (because of outbound bandwidth limits), but the asymmetrical gigabit fiber wasn't breaking a sweat.

Now 3+ years later, CenturyLink (q.com) is finally starting to come through and lay down fiber. Those tools should have been laying it 20 years ago.