As Richard points out, while the U.S. once did lag in many broadband metrics, it is simply no longer true.  Policymakers and even some trade media are confounded in their analysis by examining the wrong metrics and looking to the wrong sources.  Richard explains it all with his usual patience and lucidity.

Broadband speeds in the U.S. are improving, he points out, because of newer technologies, and by users opting into higher-speed upgrades. We also continue to enjoy low prices for entry-level broadband plans, and we ae doing well in network-based competition, fiber-optic installation rate and adoption of next-generation LTE.  We beat Europe in broadband adoption, and are doing quite well in Internet-based services.

In fact, the vaunted Europeans are starting to lament about their standing against the U.S.!

So why the continued complaints?  As Richard says:

…these facts are glossed over by the critics of U.S. broadband policy in large part because they directly contradict their neo-populist narrative of rapacious, profit-hungry broadband monopolists gouging consumers. The long tradition of American populism distrusts private provision of “essential” services and refuses to believe that competition can ever be brought to bear on infrastructure markets. Crawford in particular relies too heavily on a strained analogy with electricity, a genuine natural monopoly that is as different from the competing information networks we have in the broadband space as any network can possibly be: Can you get electric service over the air?

As they say, read it all…

Like much of the Internet, domain name management is a multi-stakeholder, consensus-driven process, or should be. This is not just because of some Woodstock generation vision about peace and harmony (although the greybeards of IETF have a lot of that going on) as much as a pragmatic reality. There is no consistent legal underpinning to the Internet, as it reaches the entire planet and operates under 180+ national jurisdictions, so nobody can actually force anybody else to behave the way they may prefer over its entire span. In the absence of force, we’re left with consensus and informal agreement.

That’s on the one hand; on the other, ICANN has contractual relationships with domain registrars that stipulate the same sorts of rights and responsibilities that most contracts do. The Internet is a commercial system, domain registrars are businesses, and businesses don’t invest capital without knowing what they own, what they can do, and what they can’t do. These contacts are binding under U. S. law.

So how do you write a contact that preserves the traditional rights that make the modern economy possible and still respect the traditions of consensus and multi-stakeholderism? This isn’t an easy task, but ICANN seems intent on making it as fractious as possible by giving itself the power to unilaterally alter the terms of its standard registrar agreement any time it wants. Any contract that can be altered by one party acting on its own but not by the other isn’t really a contract, is it?

ICANN would do well to show more respect for the consensus that makes the Internet possible by behaving in a less high-handed way. Registrar contracts may well need revision from time to time to stay in step with the evolution of the Internet and changes in the domain structure. But these changes can and should be done in a way that respects the consensus process. If ICANN sees itself as a convener rather than an all-powerful authority, it can accomplish harmonization and progress without violating the assumptions that registrars make when they invest in their businesses.

How about a little more voting and a little less of the top-down, whimsical behavior?

Broadband service is many things, but a “natural monopoly” is not one of them. In fact, advances in technology such as wireless LTE, faster satellites and increased deployment of fiber optic cable are combining to make broadband markets more competitive year after year.  Forward-looking policymakers would love electricity markets to enjoy the benefits that competition brings where it’s practical and meaningful.

As they say, read the whole thing, but if you don’t have time, at least read the takeaway:

The argument for a massive reorganization of America’s broadband markets depends on a set of facts that don’t exist. Our system needs constant attention at the margins, to ensure full participation and development in the right direction, but the system is fundamentally sound and in no need of major repairs. I wish we could say as much for our utility networks.

•  The U. S. has picked up one place in the “Average Peak Connection Speed” that’s the best measurement of network capacity, rising from 14th to 13th as the measured peak connection speed increased from 29.6 Mbps to 31.5 Mbps.
• In terms of the “Average Connection Speed,” widely cited by analysts who don’t know what it means, the U. S. remains in 8th place world-wide. but we’re no longer tied for it as we were in the previous quarter; Sweden is right behind us on this one.
• In terms of “High Speed Broadband Adoption”, the proportion of IP addresses with an Average Connection Speed greater than 10 Mbps, we remain in 7th place, but now we’re tied with  Sweden.

Another notable trend is the continued increase in mobile traffic, about which Akamai’s partner Ericsson says: “the volume of mobile data traffic doubled from the fourth quarter of 2011 to the fourth quarter of 2012, and grew 28% between the third and fourth quarter
of 2012.” This is a global figure.

The primary author of the Akamai report, David Belson, wrote a very helpful blog post last week explaining what the metrics mean, and I would commend it to any researcher who cares to understand what Akamai is measuring: it’s titled Clarifying State of the Internet Report Metrics. First, Belson explains the most widely misunderstood metric:

Average Connection Speed: As noted previously, this metric is calculated by taking an average of all of the connection speeds calculated during the quarter from the unique IP addresses determined to be in a specific country or U.S. state.  There are, however, a number of factors that can influence the average connection speed measurement:

• Parallel Requests: According to the latest figures (4/1/2013) available from the HTTPArchive project, the average Web page requires 90 requests for content.  As such, a browser will likely open multiple connections to Akamai for various pieces of content, such as the base HTML page, a shared Javascript, or one or more advertisements.  Given that these requests are all competing for a limited resource (the Internet connection’s bandwidth), each of these requests gets just a fraction of the overall resource, ultimately lowering the observed speed associated with each request.  (While these requests maybe sent over a single persistent connection from a browser to an Akamai server, they are each logged individually by Akamai.)
• Small Files: Many of the components that make up a modern Web page (such as images, CSS files, Javascript files, AJAX responses) are relatively small in comparison to software downloads and media files.  As such, the connection used to download these smaller files is often short-lived enough that it doesn’t exist long enough to reach maximum throughput rates.  (Think of it as being similar to driving on multiple short trips around your neighborhood on local roads vs. going on a multi-state roadtrip on the highway.)
• IP Address Sharing: In this increasingly hyperconnected world, a single user may have multiple Internet-connected devices, and an average household today certainly does, from smartphones, tablets, televisions, and gaming systems to thermostats and refrigerators.  If multiple devices behind a single Internet connection (unique IP address) are all consuming content simultaneously, then as highlighted above, each device will ultimately have access to just a fraction of the whole connection, ultimately lowering the overall speed calculated for each request to Akamai.  (Obviously, this is also true on a much larger scale for business connections, where requests from hundreds of users may appear to be coming from a single gateway IP address.)

One implication is that locales where highly concurrent browsers are widely used will show lower Average Connection Speeds even while users experience faster page loading. This is because newer browsers permit more connections. Here’s a comparison of some popular browsers:

What’s the point of this? The number in the right-hand column is a divisor that cuts your total network capacity down to the unit that Akamai measures in “Average Connection Speed” for browser sessions. So if you have a 50 Mbps connection (nice round number that represents what I have) and you use Internet Explorer 9, Akamai will observe an Average Connection Speed (ACS) for your IP address as low as 1/35 of the pipe’s capacity when you’re loading some web pages. In fact, it can get even lower than that if you’re loading small files that don’t last long enough for TCP to graduate from Slow Start (all TCP connections begin at an artificially low rate) and also if you’re sharing the IP address with other users, as you typically do at home and at work.

While some people argue that ACS is representative of “user experience,” Akamai’s description doesn’t say that at all: the concurrent connections are “competing for the same resource” in order to make the page load faster, but the more connections, the lower the measured speed. Hence, user experience is actually measured better by Average Peak Connection Speed (APCS) because it’s generally going to reflect a low divisor, probably one, while a long file transfer is going on.

I’m saying two things:

1. Akamai doesn’t measure page load times, only the load times of specific elements in a web page.
2. Fast page loads will show slower Akamai ACS scores with some browsers, especially Internet Explorer.

As more people gravitate to Firefox and Chrome, the ACS number will become more meaningful.  Firefox has already followed Chrome’s lead in limiting the number of parallel transfers, and IE is becoming more reasonable, although it has a way to go yet as it allow nearly twice as many parallel requests for pages that get content from multiple hosts (not uncommon for pages with ads.)

The APCS score is easier to understand; here’s what Belson says about it:

Average Peak Connection Speed: As noted previously, to calculate this metric, an average is taken of only the highest connection speed calculated from each unique IP address determined to be in a specific country or U.S. state.  Within the report, we note that we believe that the average peak connection speed is more representative of Internet connection capacity.  By using the fastest measurement observed from each unique IP address, we are capturing just those connections that reached maximum throughput rates.  Often, though not always, these connections are associated with the download of larger files, such as desktop applications, games, or software updates.  Furthermore, these connections are likely occurring late at night, or during some other period of lower usage, so while closer the theoretical maximum capacity of the connection, the measurements are unlikely to be representative of true throughput during normal conditions.  Furthermore, as an average, it will also mitigate the impact of the extremes – while there may be users connecting at Gigabit speeds in a given country, there will also be users connecting at dial-up, satellite, or DSL speeds.

How much this figure degrades during periods of high usage depends in part on the network technology in use; SamKnows finds that fiber and cable don’t degrade much at all, while DSL can degrade as much as 15%.

I continue to believe that High Broadband Connectivity is Akamai’s single most important measurement for policy purposes. Here’s what it means per Belson:

High Broadband Connectivity: As noted within the report, this metric represents the percentage of connections to the Akamai platform, from a given country or U.S. state within a given quarter, which connected at speeds of 10 Mbps or more.  In order to “qualify” for inclusion in the rankings within the quarterly report, more than 25,000 unique IP addresses from a given country needed to make requests to Akamai at speeds above 10 Mbps in that quarter.  This threshold was instituted to prevent much smaller countries, with significantly fewer unique IP addresses making requests to Akamai, from artificially outranking larger countries with more Internet users.  Note that the High Broadband threshold speed was 5 Mbps from 2008-2011, and changed to 10 Mbps starting with the 1st Quarter, 2012 State of the Internet Report.

So this number tells you what portion of the user population is able to enjoy commonly used high-speed applications.

So that’s all you need to know in order to understand the Akamai reports.

UPDATE: I’d like to add some predictions based on recent developments in broadband services. Comcast recently doubled the speeds of their mid-range broadband plans and cut the price of their highest speed plan in half, so the 20% or so of American consumers who use Comcast will clock in at higher rates in 2Q 2013, two SOTI’s from now. Another item is the ongoing high rate of conversion from long-loop ADSL to the fiber-backed short loop VDSL2+ services provided by AT&T and Century Link, and yet another is higher speed versions of Verizon FiOS. All of that is on the consumer side, but the connections that Akamai looks at include the commercial ones as well, and that’s the market where the impact of new fiber optic services is most pronounced. So we’re not done yet.

Almost immediately after Monday’s tragic bombings at the Boston Marathon, the city’s cellular networks collapsed. The Associated Press initially reported what many of us suspected, that law enforcement officials had requested a communications blackout to prevent the remote detonation of additional explosives. But the claim was soon redacted as the truth became clear. It didn’t take government fiat to shut down the cellular networks. They fell apart all on their own.

That’s right, the AP falsely reported that a government shutdown, but our futurist says network overload is “shame.” Gosh.

As we all know, communications networks of all types – plain old telephone service, cellular, broadband, and even the telegraph network – are not designed to carry information from all possible users all the time. They could be designed that way, but if they were most of their capacity would be unused most of the time, and the cost of providing service and the price of subscription would skyrocket to a point that would prevent any but the richest people from using them at all. In network design, the most important dimension is the “Erlang,” the factor of potential users expected to be active at any given time. Network capacity is assigned in accordance with the number of users expected to be active at a time, and the amount of load that the typical users is expected to offer; it’s then bumped up a little to accommodate surges in usage, but it’s never bumped up all the way to disaster proportions.

This is well understood by most of us, even if the tradeoffs behind the Erlang aren’t as well understood. If we wanted a cellular network to support a ton of phone calls during a disaster, one way we could do this would be to prevent users from running high bandwidth data apps when demand for calls is high; that would work a little bit, but would probably only double the number of calls that could be put through at the expense of all Internet access, so it wouldn’t be a good tradeoff. A more sensible course would be for people to learn some new etiquette for using networks in times of crisis.

This etiquette would consist of two things: Before you make call to a loved on in a place like Boston, ask yourself whether your call is really necessary. Chances are you’re simply going to ask the person if they’re OK, and then go on to explain that you were worried and you’re glad they’re safe, etc. If you’re really chatty, you might go on to express a stern condemnation for all acts of violence before condemning the hate object of your choice. This whole call does more for the caller than it does for the person in the midst of the crisis. If I’m a block from a bomb and running for cover, the last thing I need is a call from a random relative asking me if I’m OK. The sentiment is nice, but I take it for granted and I don’t want the distraction. Call me tomorrow and I’ll give you the whole rundown. If I don’t answer the call, don’t conclude that I’m dead, just hold your horses and wait until I can get back with you.

Most of these calls are only looking for one bit of information anyhow, a yes/no answer to the question “are you OK?” SMS is a better way to ask such questions. There’s a lot of SMS capacity in today’s networks, so if you’re a worry wart go ahead and use it. Even better, get a Twitter or Facebook account and look for my updates; that’s one thing social networks do really well.

Townsend exploits the situation in Boston by connecting it to a number of totally irrelevant issues, such as cell tower battery life and “hardened” networks:

But, as we learned in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, wireless carriers have also neglected to harden their networks against extended losses of electrical power. Thousands of towers were knocked offline in the New York region alone when backup batteries failed. Yet as a member of Governor Andrew Cuomo’s NYS Ready Commission this fall, I was stunned to learn that wireless carriers had never formally discussed plans with the region’s electric utilities to restore power to cell sites after a major disaster.

This is nonsense. Cellular networks outperformed the commercial power grid in the aftermath of Sandy, which was an event with a totally different set of challenges than the Boston Marathon Bombing in any case. The day after the bombing, the cellular network in Boston was running as it normally does, but they day after Sandy all of the New York infrastructure was in disarray – power, water, gas, highways, Internet service, and cellular. There’s no comparison. The cellular towers in New York and elsewhere are equipped with batteries and with diesel powered generators for long-term power outages, just as the POTS network is. The difference, of course, is that there are many more towers than telephone company Central Offices, so refills of diesel have to go to more places.

As to coordination, what actually happened during Sandy was that commercial power ended up borrowing diesel from the cellular operators because the cellular network was better prepared for the disaster than the power networks were.

In conclusion, Townsend goes totally off the rails:

The time to stop treating our cellular networks as an afterthought in preparedness, as expendable casualties during crises, is long overdue. In fact, they are the key to getting first responders to where they need to be, and an essential tool for resilient responses by citizens in the hours and days after a major disaster. The cellular industry has enjoyed the benefits (and profits) of access to public radio spectrum. With that access now comes enormous responsibility. We can’t afford a communications infrastructure that works only when we don’t really need it.

Actually, we can’t afford a network that can handle an infinite number of “are you OK?” calls when bad things are happening, so we need to learn how to use the one we can afford better. This means we need to do the following:

1. Prepare networks for overload and disaster: Been done.
2. Give dedicated capacity to first responders: In progress.
3. Learn what to do and what not to do with our phones in a disaster: Not even started.

Aside from etiquette, we could do a lot better by giving priority to calls and text messages to 911 in times of crisis. This means discarding naive notions of “net neutrality” in favor of common sense. After the national etiquette lesson, let’s do that.

BERLIN — A government study released Thursday supports what many German consumers have long suspected: Internet broadband service is much slower than advertised.

The study by the German telecommunications regulator, the Bundesnetzagentur, measured the Internet connection speeds of 250,000 consumers from June through December last year, making it one of the largest reviews of broadband service anywhere.

The results showed that only 15.7 percent of those using fixed telephone lines and 21 percent using mobile devices achieved the advertised maximum speeds.

This should be no surprise, as similar testing in other countries shows the same pattern: In the UK, SamKnows found a 50% shortfall, and some recent testing in Japan by academic Toshiya Jitsuzumi finds an even greater shortfall. Here’s Jitsuzumi-san’s findings:

Speed Shortfall in Japan by Advertised Rate. Source: Toshiya Jitsuzumi

The pattern is Germany and Japan is very clear: the higher the promised rate, the less likely the user is to get anything close to it. This situation contrasts sharply with conditions in the US, where we know from the SamKnows testing done for the FCC that advertised speeds and actual ones are closely aligned, especially for more advanced services such as FTTx and DOCSIS 3, and that actual upload speeds exceed advertised speeds for all technologies. In the US, users of the highest speed tiers are likely to get better performance than advertised, as a matter of fact.

Actual vs. Advertised Speeds in the US by Technology. Source: FCC

There are some differences in how this testing is done that may account for the dramatic disparity between the US and other countries, but these differences don’t account for anything like the whole disparity. The testing in Germany and Japan uses Ookla/Netindex test servers, and a test program running on the user’s desktop or laptop computer, while the US testing uses a similar test server against a test program in the user’s Internet gateway. This ensures that slow computers don’t drag down the results and computers on shared Internet connections aren’t impacted by concurrent use.

The differences that shared connections make can be quite dramatic. In Akamai’s testing, the average network capacity of all IP addresses in the US is 29.6 Mbps (Q3, 2012) while the average speed of the same connections when shared in the average way is less than 8 Mbps. The difference in performance is almost entirely caused by concurrent usage. If my connection at home or at the office is capable of 30 Mbps, I only see that when I’m the only one in the home or office who’s hitting the Internet. If a dozen co-workers are downloading files or visiting web sites at the same time, that 30 Mbps is divided among the whole group, hence the reduction in measured speed on each computer is dramatic. So in one instance, we measure the capacity of the pipe and find it’s X, and in another we measure the portion of the pipe that the typical users gets most of the time and find it’s roughly X/4. The network is running at X, but we’re dividing that speed four ways on average.

In the Japanese case, a gigabit pipe slows down to 78 Mbps, which is a pretty ordinary speed for DOCSIS and FTTP and close to the rates that will soon be achievable for FTTC with Vectored DSL. I think we have to conclude that the Japanese people are getting a raw deal from the subsidies they paid to get a nationwide fiber network.

It’s good to see coverage of broadband on the evening news regardless.

Click here to view the segment.

Bluetooth is a similar technology, one that has an even more limited range than Wi-Fi and one that has even more devices and users in play. Billions of people use these two unlicensed, low-power wireless systems.

Wi-Fi’s success has never been inevitable, however. The regulatory policy that made Wi-Fi possible could easily have gone a different way: the FCC could have required some sort of license to use Wi-Fi, it could have taxed it, it could have imposed a technology mandate on the Wi-Fi protocols (as regulators in Europe did with cell phones, thereby reducing the Continent to a follower rather than a leader in rolling out new generations of technology.) The easiest and surest way for the FCC to have strangled Wi-Fi in its crib would have been allowing a higher transmit power level.

At any radio frequency, more power means more coverage. If you increase the transmit power level, you ensure that radio waves will go farther before they spread so much that signal disperses into noise.

The implications of stronger signals aren’t too hard to understand if you’re willing to think about Wi-Fi from a system perspective. Some folks tout systems that would increase Wi-Fi power, commonly using the term “Super Wi-Fi” for them. Advocates of unlicensed use of the TV White Spaces tend to make this error quite frequently, but any time you see or hear “Super Wi-Fi” you should check your wallet because you’re about to be ripped off.

“Super Wi-Fi” is actually a system that would prevent Wi-Fi from working in most cases.

When you think through the implications of boosting the signal power level, this should become plainly obvious. The main purpose of Wi-Fi, once again, is replacing an Ethernet cable. The specifications for Ethernet cable says it can’t be more than 300 feet long. There are a lot of technical reasons for this, but the original decision – which I was a part of – picked 300 feet because we found that the average maximum length of office telephone wire runs was no more than 200 feet. In other words, most office workers sit within 200 feet of a wiring closet where the cables for their desk phones terminate. Increasing the spec by 50% meant that we could be reasonably sure that any office that could be wired for phones could just as easily be wired for Ethernet.

In fact, the original idea for Ethernet over Twisted Pair (StarLAN) used extra telephone wire pairs instead of Cat. 5 Ethernet cable. The speed of StarLAN was limited to 1 Mbps, so it was quickly replaced by 10BASE-T at 10 Mbps over new wires and a series of other standards up to hundreds of gigabits per second. So the layout of office buildings made the rules for Ethernet and Wi-Fi, just as the width of Roman ox carts made the rules for the railways 2000 years after the ox carts were designed.

Designing Wi-Fi for 300 feet of propagation in any direction from the access point allows the spectrum that it uses to be reused every 600 feet. If my access point covers a theoretical 300 foot radius, I can connect from just about any place within a 600 foot diameter. Outside my circle, someone else can operate their AP on the same channel as mine, and we don’t interfere with each other, and so on and so on.

Each access point covers 300,000 square feet or less. In the 50th most densely populated American city (Pasadena, CA) there are 5700 people per square mile or one person per 4800 square feet. So on average, a Wi-Fi access point covers 60 people. They’re not all Wi-Fi users – some 30 percent are not online at all, and others are toddlers – and those who are Wi-Fi users don’t use Wi-Fi at the same time. The average number of users connected to any Wi-Fi access point is less than one, in fact. During peak usage time, the number of users per channel is probably 10 or so, about a quarter of the potential users.

So Wi-Fi is a system designed to serve a potential user population of 40 people per channel, with no more than 10 active at a time. In practice it can go higher, but performance suffers as more people share the spectrum and have to wait for each other. In urban apartments, prime time Wi-Fi usage in the 2.4 GHz band is pretty horrific.

Now what happens if Wi-Fi signals could travel 3,000 feet instead of 300? This would simply require Wi-Fi to transmit at 1 watt, half the power of cellular GSM at 900 Mhz (two watts,) or ten times as much power as Wi-Fi uses in the 2.4 GHz (802.11 b/g/n) today, a tenth of a watt. That kind of level seems to be what the TVWS people want.

This doesn’t simply pump up the number of potential users to 400.  In this scenario, we’re looking at 28 million square feet, 4,000 people, or 1000 active users during prime time. If 100 users have a hard time sharing a Wi-Fi channel, how much joy would 1000 users have? You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to see that this would be a problem.

If you wanted to design a wireless network that shares spectrum among 4,000 potential users, with 1000 active at a time, you’d need 100 times more spectrum than we have for each Wi-Fi channel. “Super Wi-Fi” not only does not have more spectrum per channel than Wi-Fi, it has four times less per channel, 5 MHz vs. 20. There’s obviously nothing super about such a system: 100 times more users in a quarter of the spectrum doesn’t translate into peace and harmony.

The opportunity, however, is to define a system that uses more power specifically to cover rural areas with less population density. The critical factor turns out to be people per Hertz, and we know there aren’t as many people in the boondocks as in Pasadena. High-power spectrum for rural areas would be a winner because it would enable people who come to the Internet over satellite today to get there from a low-latency earth-based system. Super-sized Wi-Fi is not a generally useful tool in areas of greater population density, however.

So don’t be fooled. The surest way for the FCC to make Wi-Fi fail would be to increase its allowed transmit power or to increase its coverage by giving it access to “beach front” 700 MHz spectrum.

Sometimes it’s better to pursue humble goals successfully instead of grandiose ones that don’t make any sense in terms of basic arithmetic.

A key point from the FCC news release on Genachowski announcement is that because the 5 GHz band is now used by various federal radio systems, the FCC’s effort will require “significant collaboration” with federal agencies. For it’s part, NTIA, administrator of federal spectrum, recently reported on its initial study on making that 195 MHz available. One of its main conclusions is that more study is needed, which it will do, planning to release its findings to the FCC in December 2014. So, we’re probably looking at 2015 — if things don’t slide too much — before new rules are issued by the FCC.

NTIA is taking the position that new 5 GHz users have to work around existing federal systems. It expects that current 5 GHz sharing technologies, that will allow federal and non-federal users to coexist, will be a necessary part of expanded users. These include transmitter power control (TPC) and dynamic frequency selection (DFS). A big concern here is protection of radar; an “insidious” scenario NTIA raises is that of a radar operator not seeing a target because of interference from an unlicensed device, and not realizing interference is being received.

NTIA will also look at other spectrum-sharing approaches, such as methods employing sensing, beacons, and geo-location database methods. NTIA suggests that current 5 GHz coexistence approaches may be insufficient and says “new safeguards” may be needed; for example, it says current protection techniques did not contemplate airborne signals, such as from drones. Moreover, NTIA anticipates an expanding role for federal systems, including for homeland security.

This language sounds familiar. A year ago NTIA released an unenthusiastic report on the viability of accommodating wireless broadband in the 1755-1850 MHz federal band. What happened in the preparation of that report is what I fear may happen here: NTIA might again rely on self-reporting by federal agencies as to their spectrum requirements, and no one will make an independent check. NTIA at least says says it will lead “detailed quantitative studies” and involve federal and non-federal stakeholders, including industry. It also says it will involve the intelligent transportation community; representatives of that community recently wrote the FCC asking that it, basically, not decide anything until the technical work is done.

Coincidental with all this, DARPA is starting a program that will look at sharing between military and commercial users, with radar called out specifically for study; it’s not clear now how applicable or timely DARPA’s results will be to NTIA’s or the FCC’s work.

[cross-posted from Steve Crowley's blog]