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Ricochet Bounces Back, Cautiously
SimHacker writes: "An article in salon.com reports that the Ricochet wireless network will be bouncing back from the dead! Aerie Networks, who purchased Metricom's Ricochet network for $8.25 million, is going to offer the service in markets where it was popular, like Southern California and the Bay Area. They're also planning to lower the price of the modem from $300 to $100, and lower the monthly flat rate fee from $80 to $50. Ricochet is hardly the perfect wireless network, but it's much faster and more reliable than CDPD, so I'm really looking forward to signing back up."
Roichochet makes CPCD look like a joke. It's based on packet radio technology and the infrastructire design is closer to a military setup than anything you can do with cellular. You can communicate modem to modem directly WITHOUT paying for service, and if you pay then you can connect MODEM to MODEM through the Richochet network.
It's really cool.. My forst wireless network was a pair of their 19.2 modems... with mods to the base station I set up I could get about 3000-5000 feet range.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
"actual speeds were significantly less"
I remember getting 128k reliably and sometimes getting as much as 256k. When they said 128k, they meant it.
this was posted a couple of days ago...
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
http://www.dansdata.com/wireless.htm
he goes into a couple of wireless technologies and discusses the ricochet modems
Ryu2,
It's not very bad at all. I used to be a beta tester for these guys when they first deployed the network in Atlanta, GA. I use ssh a lot to access servers where I work and found the latency was minimal, much better than a modem and not quite as good as DSL. There were occasional pauses where the modem would lose a few packets back to the tower, but it was very reliable and stable. So much so, I could keep AIM and ssh sessions open for 6-7 hours without having to reconnect.
The Bandwidth was quite nice too. You can easily stream 128k/bit mp3's off shoutcast and other radio sites. When I had this service, I would stream mp3's off my DSL machine at home on my laptop while sitting at the park doing work or while at a friend's place (just for the uber-geek factor).
Their network also was accessible from 90% of the places I tried to use it from around town. There were countless times work would call and I would be out to dinner, instead of having to drive home and fix things, I could walk back out to the car for a few minutes and ssh in via the laptop. Well worth the money if you are in an on-call position where you are the only contact point.
The only drawback is that their network does not support a moving connection. If you are in a car, the modem loses sync at about 30mph. That's probably good since you do not want to be fiddling with your computer while operating a vehicle.
Victor
Partially true, I worked for Metricom in the engineering department for two years before they went kaputz. The S-register you refer to 304 was actually the data terminal speed. This register controlled the speed at which the radio talked to the computer it was connected to. Setting this speed at a maximum, as most of you old school BBS freaks know is always recommended. setting the S 304 register to 0 would let it autodetect the data terminal speed up to 57.6kbps. I personally set it to 115200 to get the maximum possible throughput even though it really didn't matter with the Gen 1 radios. This is not the same as the speed at which the radios talk to each other however. The poletops for the Gen 1 network (33.6 or 28.8 or whatever you want to call it) were entirely different animals than the 128k radios. The 128k poletops could talk to the Gen 1 radios, but you could not get Gen 1 poletops to talk to 128k radios at 128k speed. This is also why it is recommended to use the USB cable when using the 128k radios. The maximum a serial connection would let you download at is about 10k because of the 115200 limitation. Most people don't have high speed serial ports, don't know they have em, or whatnot, so even though the 128k radios work with a high speed serial (about 460kpbs IIRC) it was a big hastle. I can remember trying to get test setups in the lab to work with high speed serial but there were too many cabling attenuation/interference problems to get it to work that fast all the time. Serial cables are simply not designed to handle that kind of signaling speed. USB was better suited for the fast transfer rates and is why you should use it whenever you can. Trust me, they had to roll out completely new poletops in the entire Bay Area when they upgraded systems. I remember taking a "Woody" radio home and using it on the 28.8k network until they turned on the new poletops. I am afraid you are misunderstood about the 304 register and hopefully this cleared things up a little. If anyone out there can add more to this, I'd be glad; it's been a while since I worked at Metricom.
I am sure that depends on how far you are from a transponder.
The closer you get, you pass between the towers antenea quicker and lose sync (which will land you a new IP in most cases). If you are pretty far from one (few places in my town), you stay in one antenea's focus and can travel faster/further without a momentary blackout.
This is less noticable when you are browsing web pages, but I dare you to go mobile with ssh or telnet sessions open. They'll be reset ever few moments as you are being logged out and logged in quickly as you travel.
The one lacking side of their modems I forgot to mention in my previous post was the lack of support for Linux. I typically run FreeBSD (Yeah, mod me down!) and installed Linux on the box with the hopes of tinkering the card into working with it. No such luck. Let's hope the new Ricochet bounces onto the scene with some Linux support. The monetary gains from that choice wouldn't be huge, but the geeks would love them for it.
Victor
My experience with Ricochet was entirely positive. Sure, my DSL line can pull down webpages two seconds faster, but with Ricochet I can access the internet from the corner bookstore. In Detroit, the coverage was actually quite good (at least up in Troy and Rochester where I lived and worked), and the 128K speed was fine because it was mobile. There was a network started in Salt Lake City (never officially launched), and I was able to use it for about a month before it was shutdown. I really, REALLY hope SLC will have Ricochet service again soon. I would gladly pay the same price I did before they shutdown.
BTW, the Olympics were a riot (no pun intended)! Most fun I've had in quite a while.
Because the serial ports on the poletops were always set to 9600 baud. Changing 304 on a poletop would do exactly zip to throughput through that poletop.
;)
;)
/dev/st0, boys and girls!)Yes, Starmode was initially supported in the Autobahn system, but sadly went the way of peer-to-peer connections under the brain-dead Dreisbach administration. Perhaps Aaronson will remember the glory days of the early network and lift that restriction.
Your understanding of the entire system is bascially flawed. 304 is the DCE speed ONLY. Nothing to do with the radio. The original "28.8" Ricochet had an over-the-air rate of 100kbps. The original system also used the same protocol and frequencies between the portable and poletop as it did between poletops (and therefore poletop to WAP).
If you RDest'ed into a poletop, there was another S-register (one of the 800's, it's been years) that contained the actual radio speed: 100000. Change that and you just bricked the poletop.
Saying that MCOM was ripping off the customer based on this bogus analysis of the system might have had a bit more to do with your longevity there.
As to the "Autobahn" system, development certainly did continue after the first Phase 1 shipped. Autobahn (the 128k system) was a massive re-engineering, using higher speed (256k? Faster? Anyone know?) 900MHz links to the portables, and 2.3GHz (WCS) and 2.4GHz (Part 15) links from WAP to poletop and poletop-to-poletop. Going to WCS helped bound the latency, which was always an issue with the original network.
Yes, you could get 100kbps from the old radios in Starmode. (Check out
And, to get back to the original subject line, what killed Ricochet the first time was overpriced modems and service (which Aaronson seems to have corrected), horrible marketing, and serious overextension, trying to build out too many cities too fast. There were other brain-dead decisions along the way, going all the way back to announcing Autobahn in '97 and not delivering it until '00, killing Starmode and P2P, &c.
Oh, and "next to the storage area" described the location of tech support for most of the time I was there, even though that was a couple of different locations. Tech Support was next to the doors from the small parking lot when I was there.
-Z
Ricochet Tech Support 2/95-5/97
You have violated Robot's Rules of Order and will be asked to leave the future immediately.