Five Fiber Tips to Plug Into Palo Alto Fiber

Learn more about this effort underway, how to get involved, and share your support for Palo Alto Fiber

Published in

PaloAltoConnect

7 min readJan 21, 2022

The City is in the process of assessing the feasibility to provide fiber to residents and businesses via the Palo Alto Fiber project. In this new blog, learn more about Palo Alto Fiber, ways that you can share input and feedback, how to get involved with the project by connecting with neighbors, and more!

The City sees high-speed internet as a community-wide need that impacts residents, businesses, schools, hospitals, public safety, and the community’s overall quality of life. To meet the needs of the community, the City is considering leveraging its existing fiber network and investment in new fiber to offer fast, reliable internet services to businesses and residents. By doing so, Palo Alto would be joining more than 100 communities across 20 states that offer high-speed internet to their citizens and businesses.

Want to learn more and not sure where to start? Join the conversations through the following five tips on fiber.

Fiber Involvement Check List!

Are you engaged at the level you want to be? The quick check list below provides five key take-aways to join the conversation and stay up to date.

Five key ways to engage on this effort as early discussions take place:

Learn more through the online resources.
Get involved by mapping your home or business demonstrating your support and share the online platform with neighbors and friends.
Find people nearby to connect with and host a community conversation about Palo Alto Fiber. Attend upcoming meetings and become an expert in the field.
Follow and sign up for updates.
Share with your community networks!

Read on to learn more about these options to join the conversation on Palo Alto Fiber.

1. Learn About Palo Alto Fiber

Palo Alto Fiber is the project that consists of potentially expanding the current fiber backbone and network to Palo Alto residences and businesses. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown the immediate need of providing high-speed and reliable internet for our community to support work, education and learning, health care and delivery of government services.

Through Palo Alto Fiber, the City would provide broadband, high-speed internet services directly to your home and business. This includes high-speed data access to websites, television shows, videoconferencing, cloud services, or voice conversations accessed through a variety of technologies including personal computers, smartphones, tablets, and other connected devices.

Check out this educational video about Palo Alto Fiber.

Learn more about Palo Alto Fiber here. For the Palo Alto Fiber project page, go here.

2. Get Involved Because Fiber Benefits the Whole Community

Getting involved is simple! One easy way is through the Fiber Hub community map of residents and businesses who have shown support for the fiber initiative by mapping their home or business. It also offers a place to share how they plan to use Palo Alto Fiber and includes a spot to note what they’re most excited about regarding this local fiber option being considered in Palo Alto. This interactive online platform provides the opportunity to see sentiments of other community members, the ability to comment on and like other’s posts, and sign up to receive updates. You can also get involved by connecting with your neighbors on the fiber effort.

Find out about all the ways to get involved here.

3. Download the Ambassador Toolkit, Schedule a Neighbor Meetup and Attend upcoming discussions on Palo Alto Fiber

As a means to encourage community engagement among residents and businesses, the City published the Fiber Ambassador Toolkit. This Toolkit shares tools and resources about ways to host a neighbor meet up on fiber, suggested topics of discussion, sample agendas and PowerPoint slides, and more.

Being involved in the Palo Alto Fiber project means connecting with others. Hosting neighbor meetups and community conversations ensures that your neighbors know about the project, are given relevant information and potentially activates them to take action on their own. An Ambassador for the Palo Alto Fiber project simply refers to a person who wants to take an active role in supporting, promoting, and encouraging other community members to learn about, get involved, and advocate for full Palo Alto Fiber implementation and share their support with the City Council as part of the ongoing evaluation phase. This toolkit serves as a resource for community members who wish to take on a greater role. Information includes tips for organizing, hosting, and managing neighborhood meetings, ways to engage neighbors, and more.

Consider using the toolkit to support your neighborhood engagement ideas. Download the Fiber Ambassador Toolkit.

Attend an upcoming meeting on Palo Alto Fiber

The City is in the process of scheduling a series of discussions on Palo Alto Fiber and is encouraging the community to save the date and check back as details are solidified.

February 2, 5 p.m.: Utilities Advisory Commission (UAC) meeting update (virtual)
February 24, 5:30–6:30 p.m.: Palo Alto Fiber Community Information Session (virtual)
February 28 — March 4: Fiber Neighbor Meetup Week (virtual or in-person)
April: Tentative UAC meeting update
May: Tentative City Council Study Session

As details on these meetings becomes available, they will be posted here.

4. Follow and Sign Up for Updates

FIBERLink is a new publication from the City of Palo Alto to provide updates and notifications about the fiber project. The monthly newsletter shares upcoming events, FAQs from the community, the benefits of fiber and ways that you can be involved and get others involved. You’ll be the first to know what’s new and what’s next when you sign up. Don’t wait, sign up today to receive FIBERLink. To sign-up for other City digital newsletters, go here.

The City also shares weekly social media posts using the #FiberFriday tag. These weekly updates provide more information about the project and can easily be shared with your neighbors and community networks. Through Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Nextdoor, and LinkedIn, you can share the City’s posts to help your networks learn about fiber and engage other Palo Altans. Creating your own social media conversation about Palo Alto Fiber is a great start to connecting and joining the conversation on this effort.

5. Share the Fiber Hub with Friends and Encourage Them to Sign Up

Consider sharing the Palo Alto Fiber Hub with friends, neighbors, and colleagues. During this challenging time, it is more important than ever to stay connected with neighbors, friends and community groups. Engaging one another will foster new and old relationships in addition to bringing information about Palo Alto Fiber to their home.

The Palo Alto Digital Forum is a place where community members can engage on various high-priority topics that the City is currently tackling. The Palo Alto Fiber hub is a sub-site of the Digital Forum and includes an interactive platform for the community to get together virtually to talk about the Fiber project. Once at the Fiber hub, navigate to the ‘Get Involved’ tab where you will see a map with little yellow dots covering Palo Alto. These dots indicate community members who have shared their thoughts, ideas and what they’re looking forward to with Palo Alto Fiber. You can share your interest, like and comment on others posts, and sign up to receive FIBERLink updates, project announcements and notifications about Palo Alto Fiber.

Join the Conversation on Palo Alto Fiber

The City looks forward to continuing the community conversation about Palo Alto Fiber and look forward to community members being involved in this effort.

Fiber supports benefits including service excellence, local ownership, increased quality of life, investment in the community, competitive pricing, and economic development. Creating Palo Alto Fiber could mean faster resolution times, competitive pricing to customers, high-speed reliable connections at affordable costs, and it keeps dollars local. Public investment in broadband infrastructure also creates competition, improving services and keeping costs down.