owing demand for communications, combined with newly emerging technologies, has created a once-a-century opportunity to upgrade the nation's network infrastructure. "What the copper-wired telephone network was to the 20th century, the fiber network will be to the 21st," says Hui Zhang, the project's principal inves- tigator and a Carnegie Mellon associate professor of computer science. "Today we have 500 kilobits reaching 10 million American homes," he notes. Zhang is looking toward creating a system 100 times faster and that reaches 10 times more households. "We must make the system more manageable, more secure, more economical, and more scalable, and we must create an infrastructure that can support applications not yet envisioned," he says. The creation of a network to serve 100 million households with two-way symmetric data communications service at 100 megabits per second is a tremendous challenge that reaches far beyond technological issues. Universal availability of such a network promises to bring fundamental changes to daily life and could substantially raise its users' standard of living. Barriers to the network's creation, however, extend beyond straightforward deployment and cost issue-fundamental innovations in the way networks are organized and managed are also an issue. Additionally, the researchers must develop com- munication architectures that are particularly well suited to very large-scale deployment and that can operate inexpensively at very high speeds. To achieve their goal, the collaborators plan to start with basic principles and undertake fundamental research that addresses the design of an eco- nomical, robust, secure, and scalable 100 X 100 network. Then, they will con- struct proof-of-concept demonstrations to show how the network can be built. Initially, the scientists will produce a framework of what such a network might look like. Then, the network's proposed architecture and design will be disseminated to government and industry through presentations and partnerships SO it can ser