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Aerie Networks to Reactivate Ricochet Service?
JimDog writes: "Aerie Networks is apparently buying the assets and IP of Metricom's Ricochet service and plans to reactivate it in at least some of the former coverage areas. A more detailed press release in PDF format is available here." There might be some hope for Ricochet addicts after all.
I'm currently building a wearable, and a reestablished Ricochet would be excellent for that. Anybody remember what coverage was like in the SF bay area (where I live) and New England (where I go to school)?
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Let's just throw some NAPs (Neighborhood Access Points) out there and give everyone an 802.11b card. Wireless modems are silly these days. Let it die.
I tried it and had nothing but problems. Packet loss, Slow speads, and Ip drops. Hope they can make it better.
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This is most excellent news! I'll be able to use ricochet on the The Linux Car again. It makes the dashboard PC worth doing again. Without 'net access it's just another carputer / MP3player / glorified DVD machine.
Where I live there's only 24kbps dialup (phone lines suck because SBC is a big fat monopoly) Ricochet always worked for
me (except when I made mistake in my ppp setup),
and gave me 88kbps serial and 200 kbps USB.
I can't wait.
We should just admit it. Europe sucks for wireless data services and the situation is unlikely to change for a long time.
Ah well never mind. I can always have GPRS which gives me 24kbps for £15ppm for a 1 megabyte allowance, then £5 per additional megabyte. Makes reading slashdot expensive
I had one of the old Ricochet modems years ago before there was any security on the network. You could list out the names of all the other radio modems and poll top boxes that it could see. The pole top boxes had the names of the street intersections or buildings where they were mounted. Then you could dial into any of the pole top boxes, and remotely send them AT commands, to list out the other ones they could see, and walk around discovering the network that way.
But then my van was stolen, and my original Ricochet was in it, with a "Big Brother Inside" sticker on it. I immediately called Metricom and asked if my modem had been turned on and reported in. It had, and they checked the logs and gave me the address of the pole top box in a dangerous San Jose neighborhood. I rented a car and drove all around the neighborhood looking for my stolen van, but didn't find it. But a couple weeks later the van did show up right around that neighborhood, totally stripped.
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
Hi Don!
;)
I was the TSE on the other end of the phone when you called to trace your van. I remember that call well.
Like you, I hope Aerie does something.... I got rather addicted to the notion of web access everywhere.
-Zandr
You have violated Robot's Rules of Order and will be asked to leave the future immediately.
Someone please double-check my reading of the press pieces:
Metricom winds up $1G in debt, with creditors expected to recoup about a quarter of that when you count cash in the bank and bond interest; so, about $750M loss for creditors.
Aerie acquires all the interesting assets of Metricom -- that is, everything unique that would cause investors to take the risk -- for $8.25M.
Chapter 7 protects Aerie from the ~$740M difference.
I know it's hardly a unique situation, but the numbers jumped out at me this time. It's such a great investment strategy: if you can just figure out how to get someone else to spend 100x what's profitable and then have them lose so badly that you can buy the interesting bits at a garage sale.
Ricochet was relit around ground zero after the attacks to give the workers internet access http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1004-200-7372683.html? tag=owv
The current dominant standard, GSM, is evolving toward WCDMA/UMTS. This is the upgrade path all GSM and most IS-136 networks will take. GSM/GPRS uses the same data infrastructure and protocols as WCDMA/UMTS. Oddly enough, GSM is more different from WCDMA/UMTS than IS-95 (CDMA) is from CDMA2000. CDMA also has some technology advantage over GSM. But it's kind of a Betamax thing: it is better to be widely used than it is to be better technologically.
Both 3G standards use CDMA technology, but they are not compatible. Maybe there will be dual mode radios that will be cheap enough to work on both kinds of networks.
Anybody know what iDen's upgrade path is?
How do I turn off the redundant things in the square brackets?
I wrote parts of this stuff
Interesting post - but someone already paid for the Ricochet deployment, while 1xRTT and other 2.5-3G technology has yet to be deployed, rolled out, paid for, etc.
.5mbps Ricochet that was under development once upon a time.
With voice revenues thinning, I doubt the cellcos will be able to subsidize all this data buildout with voice. They lost that critical mass months ago.
Ricochet may be back, and with only 8.5 million and paltry operational costs (as long as the circuits stay up, the Ricochet NOCs can be run by TWO people), it'll take nothing for them to begin making money and possibly deploying the
Then there's the National Semiconductor Ricochet chipset that was almost done....
I used Ricochet inside a tank-like commercial building with aluminum ceilings and got the highest connection rate. This was in North Hollywood. When I signed up, the guy said the biggest myth about Ricochet was that it was only good outdoors, or while you were moving. It can do that, too, but if your house or apartment or office was in a coverage area, then it will likely work fine.
I even used it in my house right on the edge of San Francisco, and used it coming over the Bay Bridge from Oakland, and it got a signal right as we came off the San Francisco side of the bridge, so San Francisco seems pretty well covered. There are like 17 big hills here, so you can put stuff like this on top of the hills and get everybody.
Even if you use it indoors most of the time, it's still a great deal. You don't have to hook your house or apartment up to the Internet, just hook yourself up with a PC Card in your computer. Taking it to the library was really great, or working at a coffee shop or whatever.
I just got a new PowerBook, and I keep looking at the PC Card slot and wishing there was a working Ricochet modem in there 24/7. I used to think I'd just use Ricochet forever myself, combined with 802.11 when I bump into a network. Between the two systems you can go to a lot of places and be connected without having to fall back on the phone modem or regular Ethernet.
I don't think there's anything wrong with having two different systems, either. Eventually, they'll fit 802.11 and Ricochet onto one chip/card and the computer could use whatever is available automatically. In the meantime, if one system doesn't scale well enough or has some other problem (like Ricochet is having now), then the other fills in the gap. Seems like some people think that they have to be against Ricochet because they like AirPort.