Announcing CivicNet,

January 7, 2002 3:05 PM

Announcing CivicNet, a Metropolitan Area Network (or MAN). In short, it is broadband for the masses in the Chicago area to be developed over a span of 10 years (if you're lucky). To be clear: I am not the man.
posted by moz (9 comments total)

via slashdot.
posted by moz at 3:07 PM on January 7, 2002

Listen carefully, for I am the voice of doom. Long term computer projects always fail.
posted by holloway at 3:18 PM on January 7, 2002

This is like SFNet in San Francisco. What ever happened to that?
posted by laz-e-boy at 4:08 PM on January 7, 2002

This rather reminds me of way back in the 80s when Chicago started accepting bids for cable. They wanted an absurd feature set, including more channels than actually existed at the time.

Like many things, including "everybody will have broadband," beleive it when it happens and not a moment before
posted by ilsa at 4:17 PM on January 7, 2002

I can't find the link but there's already a grass-roots wireless 802.11 network in some parts of Chicago. The catch is all the access nodes are free if you host a node, if you don't you have to pay something like $10-$20 a month.

I'm not sure if its even a company as much as it is a bunch of geek hobbyists, last time I checked in on them they weren't serving my neighborhood and were calling the fees donations.
posted by skallas at 5:17 PM on January 7, 2002

can we get a SeattleNet, or KingCountyNet? perhaps a good cooperative PhD project for a dozen UW students in business, marketing, computer science, design, etc?
posted by greyscale at 10:32 PM on January 7, 2002

Tacoma,WA already has something like this, the municipally owned power company of Tacoma provides both cable TV and broadband service. The City of Tacoma installed fiber-optic cable across the entire city. The power company isn't actually an ISP, instead they lease IPs to third parties to provide service. Which is great because not only do you have competing businesses, but the backbone of the network is secure in the fact that it can't crumble like @Home.

The power company originally was going to install fiber optic just to control its power substations, but upon further review decided to expand the fiber optic to provide service to the entire city. When I had my cable modem installed, I just called the power company, gave them my MAC address, and blammo I was on the network (I have a two year lease on an IP address).

Tacoma, America's #1 Wired City
posted by patrickje at 1:19 AM on January 8, 2002

Let's see. University town Evanston, just over the city limits from Chicago, planned a city-wide broadband network centered on Northwestern U and the city's wan spate of high-tech businesses. How's it doing, four years on? Well, they got nothing usable from the RFPs, so they scaled back to a community-based DSL reseller as a stopgap, which itself was sunk by the failure of its broadband partners.

skallas: slightly off-topic, but freenetworks.org provides listings, and there's some more links at community wireless, as well as this excellent categorized list.
posted by dhartung at 8:30 AM on January 8, 2002

Greyscale, Seattlewireless.net does exist. They have an active mailing list and a fair number of nodes around town.
posted by anitar at 9:06 AM on January 8, 2002