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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."
From the article: "Aerie will market the service more to homes and businesses looking for an alternative to the high-speed Internet access available through cable modems and digital subscriber lines" I don't see how they plan to compete with wired broadband in areas like Southern CA and the Bay area, which, AFAIK, are quite wired already. If I remember the Ricochet specs, the modems top out at 128kb/s (actual speeds were significantly less). How do they plan to convert people who are paying the same, or only $5 or $10 more for a much faster connection?
My other sig is funny!
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.
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.
I heard about it a couple of days ago. Its kind of ironic that I saw a banner ad from Aerie about this (on a site that may or may not have been slashdot). Hehehe. Funny.
Anyway, I'm not terribly familiar with the limitations of wireless. Can anyone provide a link to some good info about its capabilities, pros/cons, etc? In these parts, there is really no other hope for broadband, and I'm wondering if wireless could eventually flourish in rural areas.
What could possibly hurt the security of the American people more than giving our own government the ability to hide its
this was posted a couple of days ago...
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
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.
What they need to do is tiny PDA modem. USB visor
or compach flash form factor. I would love to use this service with my PDA.
The proliferation of public access WLAN's could possibly push servcies, such as Ricochet's to the wall. Sure, public access WLAN's are very scattered at the moment, but with the cost of setting up an AP with a decent range is only a few hundred dollars. More and more people seem to be setting up AP's, and have authorization to set up antennae on radio masts and providing a very good service. The community seems to be thriving, connecting zones together over the inernet using VPN software, and setting up full routing infrastructures to handle Internet access.
Sure, there wont be any real SLA's in place, but with so many AP's connected to different ISP's, then network redundancy wouldn't be much of an issue.
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.
My exposure to Ricochet was the "slow" version offered here in Washington, DC. It was most useful for remote use in areas where you knew the coverage was good. It could be good in one place, and horrible just down the block. I saw a lot of them in use in Congressional hearing rooms.
However, on the "reliability" side, CDPD ruled. Verizon CDPD has much better coverage, and you can depend on it almost everywhere. For my particular application, a mobile webcam in a car, CDPD was much more reliable than Ricochet. AT&T CDPD seems pretty good too, but I only used that for OmniSky with my Palm on Amtrak.
CDPD is a bit slower than the "slow" Ricochet. But of course, there is no Ricochet now, only CDPD...
I'd love to see how the "fast" Ricochet compares. There is a poletop unit at the end of my street, and I used to be able to get Ricochet in the bedroom with a window that faces that direction.
http://www.dansdata.com/wireless.htm
he goes into a couple of wireless technologies and discusses the ricochet modems
I too live in Portland, OR and emailed the Ricochet people, begging them to bring their service to Portland area. They died before letting me use their service. Bastards!
Latency with Ricochet (at least the 128k version) was pretty low - I typically got 200-300msec, sometimes a little lower, occasionally a lot higher. This is fine for ssh connections (and I used ssh constantly with mine), but Counterstrike is right out. (Believe me, I tried! Latency goes up when you're transmitting a lot of packets in both directions.)
However, it worked great for tetrinet, which I was hooked on at the time.
I used the service in the Bay Area, Phoenix, New York, and DC, and the performance stayed within the same ranges across all cities (the main determinant of speed and latency was how many repeater hops one had from one's location, but I found the service generally delivered 128k as promised and 256k+ on occasion.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
I meant... 155 Mbps
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
I'm sorry you feel you have an axe to grind with Ricochet - I do too, being a former customer who lost service (though I no longer live in a service area). I also think they should have gone for volume with their pricing model, instead of catering to the overpaid-techie set.
Last time I questioned your assertion that the 128k upgrade was no more than "changing an S register on the poletops", you corrected me on a few points - namely that the old modems used frequency hopping to avoid collisions with the old poletops. I haven't tested this, but let's stipulate it.
You did not address my (correct) assertion that the newer poletops did use a different band for backhaul (2.3 GHz WCS/2.4GHz ISM), where the old poletops used the same 900 MHz band as the modems. (This information came not from "marketing drivvel" [sic] but from a paper presented at interop by Metricom engineers). (As to my other assertion - that the 128k modems used 4FSK vs. FSK, I admit that I don't remember where I read that.) So why do you claim that the new service was no different than the old?
No, I didn't work for Metricom. You worked tech support for Metricom. Based on my experience with Metricom's tech support, this explains alot about your attitude and (mis)understanding of the network. The upgrade was more than just "changing an S register on the poletop." Why do you insist on claiming otherwise?
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
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.
I've seen little rectangular boxes with small antennas dangling from streetlights appear in my area (Mercer County-Hamilton, NJ).
Are these the antenna's that Ricochet uses?
-ted
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.
It's too flat so the poletops would get far too much range. They'd be shit out of luck if they provided a decent coverage area.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Back when the network was owned by Ricochet I was this close to subscribing because at the time my apartment's phone lines were snafu and I couldn't get a 24k dial-up connection let alone get DSL service. In retrospect I'm glad I didn't go with it because I'd be out a few hundred bucks and stuck with the modem. However as the service might pick back up I'm going to weigh the option again.
The sort of stuff that would entice me to be a customer wouild be support for more than just Windows. Office Mac support and maybe unofficial Linux support at the least I would think. Far too often I'm SOL because I have a Powerbook. No one seems to want to support MacOS which seems odd for wireless networking equipment considering you'd figure Powerbook/iBook users would be a pretty big market considering the sort of people who buy them. I've been looking for a means to connect my Samsung 3500 phone to my Powerbook but my only option is a mess of cables and converter boxes that would cost as much as the wireless modem that I don't want to get suckered into buying since I can't figure if the Mac support is shitty or non-existant. Linux support at least on slashdot seems pretty obvious. I think the sort of people who'd pay 50$/mo for wireless internet service are the same types who'd also jam Linux on their laptop. They'd also need to move service into areas who'd actually use it. In their Southern California coverage area Ricochet covered the cities I would have deemed least likely to need or want wireless internet. The most likely parts of Orange, LA, and Riverside counties didn't have coverage at all or in some cases had sparse slow coverage. Maybe it is just a regional thing but down here we're wary as can be if we're toting electronics, in the Bay Area people have got LCD screens and antennas up the wazoo.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.