My battles with the cable companys are bordering on legendary, marathon sessions of screaming and countless self inflicted head tramuas have tought me a few things about dealing with incompetance and greed.  So finally when I got one of the RCN 'were charging you more and if you want to opt out that's gonna cost you too' postcards in the mail, I was beyond pissed.  The quality of our connection is finally to a place where I don't have to worry about it going out when I need it most (read Comcast, who actually disconnected our cable while trying to kill our neighbors then took 3 days to come out and fix it), I see this stuff.  So I started looking for alternitives.  What I found was interesting, it seems that the traditional ISP has gone the way of the buffalo. All of the cable providers are the same, same price same bad service, same incompetant tech support.  To make things worse there is no one out there to combat the rising sludge. There is hope on the horizion with groups out there like the North Carolina, Greenlight. Which was based around a municipal attempt to bring fiber optic cable to the home.  Where I paid for a 5mbps connection they are getting 100mbps.  Something about this process stinks, and it lead me to look to see if there was any effort in Chicago to do something similar.  Turns out there was, it wes called CivicNet I managed to find a couple of papers on it but never anything about what happened to it.  So I am now on the hunt, if you know anything about what happened to this project please feel free to leave me a message.