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.

Comments

Hooray!

[Galvatron]

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)?

Re:Hooray!

[rjamestaylor]

Ricochet was great if you stayed put, but in a moving vehicle it had great trouble microcell-hopping

First, why are you driving (most do) and using an Internet connection?

Second, that's not my experience. I, a driver and a Ricochet user, drove 80 MPH down I-5 (between the 91 and the 405) often maintaining a constant AOL AIM chat session and an ssh telnet connection to my server(s). I also did this on PCH between the 55 and Long Beach (though only at 60 MPH). There was no trouble "hopping" -- AIM and TeraTermPro w/ SSH don't handle drop packets well at ALL.

Don't try that at home, kiddies.

Ricochet as an alternative to OnStar

[SimHacker]

I'm a long time Ricochet customer, and reluctantly switched to a CDPD modem after they shut down. CDPD is horrible -- extremely slow at its best, and usually much worse. It must be really low priority relative to voice traffic, because my cell phone conversations usually don't drop out and hang up all the time like CDPD always does.

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

Re:Hardware?

[Zigurd]

There are two main flavors of 3G: WCDMA/UMTS and CDMA2000. The standards are at 3gpp.org and 3gpp2.org, respectively. Even though the 3gpp site looks like it was put together by 6th graders, 3gpp is by far the bigger, more influential organization, and WCDMA/UMTS by far the dominant 3G standard. But CDMA2000 (3gpp2) will be viable in the U.S., Korea, and a few other places.

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?

Re:Background on Ricochet

[gig]

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.