"It's in the city's interest to get more industry here, and more high-tech industry here," says Douglas G. Powers, assistant commissioner in the department of general service and project director of CivicNet. "CivicNet is a project that will make real estate significantly more valuable in the city of Chicago."

The city will shortly issue a request for proposals seeking a telecommunications vendor willing to provide the necessary infrastructure uniformly throughout the city for 10 years. It may not be too difficult, as Powers says 63 vendors responded to a request for information.

Besides offering the vendor up to $32 million in annual revenues, the city also has compiled a list of potential customers, notable among them institutions of higher education such as DePaul and Loyola Universities as well as the Illinois Institute of Technology, Powers says. CivicNet would serve as a "giant co-op," Powers adds, allowing members to buy access to high-speed technology at a reduced cost.

"The reason there hasn't been any new infrastructure is because there hasn't been enough (return on investment)," Powers says. CivicNet, he adds, hopes to do that by increasing potential revenues, lowering expenses, while requiring no subsidy from the taxpayers or putting the city in competition with telecom providers.

One tenet of CivicNet is that high-speed bandwidth is provided through all neighborhoods, rather than the already wired Downtown and neighborhoods on its periphery. "We don't want to continue a situation where the parts of town with money get the best services and the parts of town that don't have money get the worst services," Powers says. "That only perpetuates a bad situation."