The staff of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has released the National Broadband Plan. Its goal is to ensure that "at least 100 million U.S. homes should have affordable access to actual download speeds of at least 100 megabits per second and actual upload speeds of at least 50 megabits per second."

The National Broadband Plan is available for download. It weighs in at 12 megabytes and 376 pages; if all is going well, this will take about 30 minutes to download on a 56 kilobit/second modem. This may be your top speed if you live in parts of the county like Lyndon Township; that township government's guide to broadband access notes that high speed access to the Internet in that township is very limited, with minimum access to DSL and cable TV-based broadband internet, no widespread WiFi access and marginal reception in many areas of cell phone-based wireless data services.

Edward Vielmetti is the lead blogger at AnnArbor.com.