California in particular also has more stringent rules for commercial buildings with seismic requirements. While a nonpen mount is great, you still have to get the service into the building somehow.
Back in 2005 when I moved to this area, I worked directly across the street from what is now the stadium - at that time it was Great America's parkling lot. The area still shows dead on the CA broadband map, but all we could get was AT&T DSL or your typical telco circuits. This is despite being in a very urban area in the heart of Silicon Valley, JUST up the road from the datacenter we used at the time (Globix). We ended up having to do a wireless P2P to the McAfee building up the road, and getting the cable from the roof in I'm pretty sure required the contractor to x-ray the roof after they were done which I believe was pre-stressed concrete panels.
To this day, many of those dead zones still exist. I've been to many RURAL areas with far more consistent Internet access than Silicon Valley, and it certainly does seem odd.
-Patrick