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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."
It is one of the best internet deals around. When I used to live in the bay area, there was a great little pub (Scruffy's in Sunnyvale) that had a pole pretty close.
You could sit in the back of the pub, and download at around 25KBs-35KBs. I would gladly pay $100 to get that service again, and I just hope they migrate it up to Portland soon.
I used this as a substitute for DSL because of where I was living down there (apartment complex screwed the phone trunk) and it really worked beautifully. I had a few system outages that never went more than an hour, and it was reliable and fast. Latency was much less than I expected.
It's a fabulous device when you are out on the go, I remember one time looking at real estate in the bay area having a friend drive me around while I surfed the net to find directions and maps, and new houses in the area. It really is great technology.
K, I'll stop being metricoms whore.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Lumpy, you're a know-nothing tool. The P2P connection ability was removed from the hardware of the newer modems. Your old 19.2s will work, but not the newer jobs.
Do I have a decent chance of using telnet, ssh, or playing Counterstrike with this wireless network?
I know for satellites, you can't realistically do any of the above -- hopefully, with the transmitters on the ground and not in geosynchronous orbit, it will be better.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
I came into the company at a time when the .com boom was just starting to happen. I was young and didn't quite understand business politics yet, so I thought it was right to point out when things are outright ripping off the customer or in the very least preventing the company from dominating the market. My "self rightousness" cost me my job.
You see my freinds, the ricochet development cycle really ended after the first modem was introduced. Sure it got smaller and faster, or so you think. The ricochet was allways capable of 128kbps speed. There was a s register that could change the modem speed to that maximum rate, but unless you were transferring from ricochet to ricochet at a distance of 100 feet or less, you would never see 128kbps from their network. This is because the poletops were set at 9600baud.
Now to understand how you can get 28.8 from poletops set at 9600 you have to understand how the ricochet network works. Basically you are surrounded by these poletops, all shooting out bits at 9600 baud, they are multiplexed together by your modem and combined to get the desired bandwidth. Thus 9600 from 3 poletops would give you 28.8. Internally people who knew about this and thought it was wrong were fired over the years. There was a lot of them trust me.
Whenever a new modem standard like 33.6 or 56k came out, metricom would release a new "Modem software upgrade" that "contained new code!" that would magically turn your 33.6 ricochet into a 28.8 one. All it did was change the default setting of that S Register, maybe some new stuff was added, but thats about it. Nothing really magical or fancy, they fired all the real engineers that created the modem in the first place long ago. All that was left was a skeletal crew that could never really improve the internal electronics design.
When they were "Upgrading the Ricochet Network!" this was nothing more than more smoke up the ass of ricochet users. The poletops speed was simply set from 9600 to anything higher. Just a stupid S register that was allways there.
I think Ricochet's real downfall wasn't the technology, when it was introduced allmost 5 years ago, it was capable of delivering 128kbps service. So the failure can only be found in the strategy used by the marketdroids. $20@month for 128kbps wireless internet service vs $20@month for a standard 28.8 isp would have sold a lot more modems than the $40@mo ricochet $20@mo standard ISP model that they took.
They did do an amazing job creating the network, just a shame that they never put that same effort into people that acually understood the internet market. People have allways gone with the cheaper ISP simply because they want to save money. Anyways I hope no heads roll from my comment.
Oh in case you're wondering what the magic s-register was, its ats304=115200. The reason they made it so slow in the beginning is back then most motherboards were using a 8250 UART, which was limited to 14.4 speeds.
Bah, not true. I have a GS and a GT, both of which can talk to each other just fine, even where poletops are not visible.
I'm doing some work in my living room right now or i'd get out the modems and do an ats300? for ya. Still can if you don't believe me.
At the very least, I'd like to put the poletops into a friendly mode where they'll pass packets for any customer modem that asks. Even if there's no route out to the internet, some wide-area data service would be great.