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Reviving Ricochet: Better Than WiFi?
renard writes "Slate is carrying a column by Brendan Koerner arguing that reviving the Ricochet city-wide wireless network infrastructure would be a better idea than blanketing the nation/world with 802.11-ish WiFi. He reviews all the usual
silly reasons why Metricom, the original owners, were unable to make a go of it, and makes a good case that things may go better the second time around."
Until the government shuts them down because the terrorists are using them.
Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies.
Richochet bounce back.
~$22MB and $1.4GB? What do those stand for - megabucks and gigabucks? :-)
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
This is probably way off topic, but...
Ricochet provides seamless coverage across an entire city that works even when a user is traveling 70 miles per hour on a highway
Did anyone else get an image of Bill Murray in "Where the Buffalo Roam" driving down the highway at 70 MPH while banging away at a typewriter? Oh yeah, and folks think driving with cel phones are bad!
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
... what the ping-rate was?
-Laz
Cat 4?
What are you running, 16 meg Token Ring?
There are really only two rules in networking - Ethernet always wins, and IP always wins. In fact, that's just one rule - open, standard technology always wins.
The reason is of course that innovation and competition is maximised when there is a common standard on which the market is based - wired Ethernet has gone from 3 meg, via 10/100/1000 to 10 Gig, and changed media from thick coax to thin coax to UTP to fibre, and expanded its range to WANs (in the 10G incarnation).
WiFi is going the same way, and since Ricochet is proprietary there is no way it can keep up - early WiFi was LAN only and 2 meg, and is now 11 meg, 22 meg or 54 meg. There are now point-to-point long range implementations of WiFi, and point-to-multipoint to cover a few square miles (like DSL). Some companies are producing QoS-enabled versions of WiFi, and using it for VoIP service. Arraycomm is doing smart antennas that track individual users with a narrow beam as they move around, improving bandwidth. Mesh networks companies are adapting WiFi to Ricochet style deployments where packets bounce between poletop radios, or other customers' nodes, before hitting a wire.
None of this is happening for Ricochet, because the technology is proprietary, hence there's no competition and little innovation going on. It probably is better at covering a whole city than WiFi, but it doesn't matter, because WiFi will evolve to solve these problems - probably via mesh network technology, which is highly efficient since it can route around foliage or building blockage, and very scalable since crowds bring their own capacity with them.
Roaming and billing are happening as well, which are essential so that increased usage of popular hotspots can drive more investment in better kit to support more users. As much as people dislike bandwidth caps and time-based billing, this is one reason why mobile/cellular operators are still in business and Metricom isn't. It should still be possible for heavy users to get reasonable-cost packages that enable them to use a lot of bandwidth, and of course when they are at home or work they can use the same kit on a no-billing basis to access local WiFi networks.
Applications are coming along as well, due to this flexibility, including drive-by downloading, location-based apps (where's the closest Italian restaurant?), etc - whereas Ricochet was tied to the short-hop between poles model, providing very high latency that prevents VoIP, WiFi can be implemented in different ways, allowing someone to make VoIP calls when in a conventional hotspot. Although it's debatable if VoIP will be a real application for public WiFi, it is very useful for people with smart PDA/phone kit in a large retailer - just carry one device to check stock and make phone calls in-store.
The only question in my mind is how all this works with 3G, GPRS and so on - probably they will co-exist, with WiFi as the high-bandwidth option when in range and 3G/GPRS as the low-bandwidth option. Wireless kit will tend to support both WiFi and mobile/cellular standards (Nokia and others already sell WiFi/GPRS PC Cards), with seamless roaming and a single bill (which all the vendors are working on).
Hi, neighbor! Damn. I've given enough information to identify myself to a neighbor who calls himself "Psyko". Time to move! :)
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello