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Why 100 million homes?

There are approximately 100 million homes in the United States today, so the goal of the 100x100 project is a network that provides universal access - at least the same level of coverage provided by telephone service today. We argue that ubiquitous access is transformative to society and enables new applications and cost-savings that partial coverage solutions will not be able to acheive.

Why 100 Mbps?

There are several reasons to target 100 Mbps as the connection speed for the next generation of network:

  • A 100 Mbps connection to the home is between a factor of 10 and 100 times faster than almost all current connections, especially in the United States. It is after these order of magnitude jumps in performance that new applications tend to emerge. We cannot predict today what use will be made of the bandwidth tomorrow.
  • 100 Mbps is fast and flexible enough to offer the "triple play" of supporting voice, data, and multiple video streams over the same technology. Even cable modems, which use the same physical cable to deliver both video and data, still operate effectively separate networks that share media. A single network that can support the triple play would be a major savings to the economy, as the existence of multiple networks ultimately raises costs to consumers, who must pay the bill for maintaining those multiple networks.
  • 100 Mbps is in a technology/cost sweet spot for the near future. Building connections with slower speeds does not cost significantly less, while building connections with higher speeds costs significantly more. As part of the 100x100 design, we are working to ensure that the architecture supports upgrades to higher speeds, and that the fixed assets that are very expensive to replace (like wires and fiber) can be reused by all foreseeable upgrades. In building the economic and policy models for the 100x100 network, we are including the cost of upgrades and maintenance to ensure the network can be self sustaining.