I'm not a huge fan of government run services, but the various efforts to set up Municipal WiFi seem to be a reaction to the utter inertia of the telcos. Witness the standard objections of Verizon to a Michigan effort, and then read about QWest's decision that the pacific northwest doesn't need fiber:

Over a year has passed since the study, with no meaningful change in the Seattle broadband scene. Qwest still has no plans to offer anything beyond its current vanilla DSL offerings in the near future, according to Notebaert. With 55 percent of area residents still on dial-up by Qwest's figures, there's no demand says the Qwest CEO. "If the customer says 'I'm ready,' we're going to pour it on," he said. "I can see over the next couple of years—say three to five -- customers will want 10 [Mbps speeds] and then going to 25 [Mbps]."

With clueful comments like that, is it any wonder that municipalities want to build out on their own? Downloadable tv/movies are here already, and that's going to require bandwidth.