About five months ago I was taking out the trash to the alley cans behind the bunker in Bucktown when I spied a telephone company truck with a big roll of cable mounted on the back. I walked over and took a quick glance at the cable, which indicated that the cable was 144-count singlemode fiber optics.
I asked one of the technicians when I could get singlemode fiber to my house to replace my finicky and relatively low-bandwidth copper cabled DSL. He said I should give the office a call. Two weeks later two technicians came out and installed the singlemode connection all the way to a box under my desk, which is connected to a new ISP-supplied router that is hooked up to my LAN. My bandwidth immediately boomed to 90 Mbps downlink and 45 to 50 Mbps uplink. And they dropped my monthly price by $10 — heck of deal.