Update: Doug (in the comments) provides a direct link to the Pioneer Press story. Thanks! He also tells me that the PiPress doesn’t have a paywall. Wrong. If you start at the PiPress home page, and search for ‘fiber optic,’ your only search settings are ‘Recent,’ ‘Archives’ or ‘Web.’ A recent search yields no hits. An archive search finds the article but tells me I have to pay $2.95 to see it. A search over the Web from the PiPress site using ‘fiber optic St. Paul’, gets me a Minneapolis Star Tribune article (behind their paywall), the LaserFocusWorld article that I link to below, and even this blog post. But nothing at PiPress (at least on the first page of hits). So maybe there is a version of the article outside of the archive/paywall section, but there is no way to find it. I also tried some Google and Google news searches with no luck in digging up that PiPress link but always a hit on the StarTrib story. So PiPress, you better work on your search profile, both internally and externally. Bonus links.

LaserFocusWorld has a reprint of a St. Paul Pioneer Press article about St. Paul considering a fiber optic network. (The original article is behind the Pioneer Press paywall now.)

St. Paul explores fiber optic link for entire city by Jason Hoppin.

It's thorough and looks and takes a look at big city fiber optic from several angles including discussing the public utility concept where there is a local model with District Energy, the downtown St. Paul utility that provides alternative energy sources.

We need high-speed dependable networks. Wireless (the Wi-Fi flavor) is great for roaming around and it's cheaper to build out but it's relatively slow and subject to all kinds of interference.