I've had shipments from UPS that were left out on back balconies with no note, sometimes for weeks. I had one that appeared on a second-floor outside patio, where the only way to get the box up there was to throw it. Shipments that were almost sent back because I was never notified that they had arrived and were being held, various other horror stories. Stay away from UPS.
So, it's basically a 28k - 56k service, that can "theoretically" go as fast as 170k, while Ricochet was a 128k service, with real-life throughput of up to 300k. They charge 40 bucks for 10MB, while Ricochet charged $40/month (for local-only service in San Diego--$75/month for nationwide) for as much data as you wanted (I used as much as 100MB/day at times). Be still my heart.
As a matter of fact, Ricochet's raw bandwidth *is* 1Mbps. They have (had?) plans to increase the raw speed by a factor of four, without any drastic changes to their current setup. The actual net throughput on Ricochet can be far in excess of what they advertise. If my Ricochet connection only gets 128K throughput, I think something's broken--it's usually double that or better.
I don't believe there is a better technology in existence, if you want real mobility. Advocates of other technologies have claimed higher throughput, but in several cases they have run into problems when they tried to put their ideas into practice. There are several Ricochet subscribers on this topic, including myself, who see these real-life speeds on a daily basis.
This is the worst news I've heard in a while. I've used Ricochet as my only Internet access at home for about two years. There's still no DSL in my neighborhood, but I decided Ricochet was fast enough (256k+) that I didn't care about DSL even if it did become available here--having truly portable fast Internet access is highly addictive. I've used my Ricochet on business trips, even once while stuck in a plane waiting to be deiced at DFW for four hours. This service is too good--surely *somebody* can make a profit from it.
Speed: closer to DSL (I have seen over 300k, regularly get >200k)
Price: $75/month (from WWC).
Yes, somewhat slower than DSL and somewhat more expensive, but the portability is worth it (and where I live there's no DSL available anyway).
If they manage to get back on track, they had planned an upgrade later this year that would bring average throughput to 400kb, with burst speed over 700kb.
Ricochet has always been a bit conservative about its bandwidth figures. I regularly see speeds of 200kb and higher--they're actually close to 10x CDPD speeds. The technology can easily reach DSL speeds, and Ricochet had planned to expand their network to double throughput with existing modems. And, no per-minute charge, so you can actually get significant work done.
They definitely need *much* better marketing...
...and try to get your facts straight. Doug Engelbart was never at PARC, and neither he nor Alan Kay were in the research group that developed ARPAnet. Doug Engelbart's group was at SRI, later moved wholesale to Tymshare, Inc., not sure what happened after Tymshare was bought out by McDonnell-Douglas. Alan Kay's group did invent Smalltalk. They freely acknowledge a debt to Simula in the design of Smalltalk, so Alan Kay most certainly did not invent OOP, though Smalltalk did a great deal to popularize the concept. Dan Ingalls is generally regarded as the chief architect of Smalltalk. _Dealers_of_Lightning_ is the best account I've seen of early days at PARC, acknowledged as accurate by those who were there. Please read it before putting up another article mentioning PARC.
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I've had shipments from UPS that were left out on back balconies with no note, sometimes for weeks. I had one that appeared on a second-floor outside patio, where the only way to get the box up there was to throw it. Shipments that were almost sent back because I was never notified that they had arrived and were being held, various other horror stories. Stay away from UPS.
So, it's basically a 28k - 56k service, that can "theoretically" go as fast as 170k, while Ricochet was a 128k service, with real-life throughput of up to 300k. They charge 40 bucks for 10MB, while Ricochet charged $40/month (for local-only service in San Diego--$75/month for nationwide) for as much data as you wanted (I used as much as 100MB/day at times). Be still my heart.
As a matter of fact, Ricochet's raw bandwidth *is* 1Mbps. They have (had?) plans to increase the raw speed by a factor of four, without any drastic changes to their current setup. The actual net throughput on Ricochet can be far in excess of what they advertise. If my Ricochet connection only gets 128K throughput, I think something's broken--it's usually double that or better. I don't believe there is a better technology in existence, if you want real mobility. Advocates of other technologies have claimed higher throughput, but in several cases they have run into problems when they tried to put their ideas into practice. There are several Ricochet subscribers on this topic, including myself, who see these real-life speeds on a daily basis.
This is the worst news I've heard in a while. I've used Ricochet as my only Internet access at home for about two years. There's still no DSL in my neighborhood, but I decided Ricochet was fast enough (256k+) that I didn't care about DSL even if it did become available here--having truly portable fast Internet access is highly addictive. I've used my Ricochet on business trips, even once while stuck in a plane waiting to be deiced at DFW for four hours. This service is too good--surely *somebody* can make a profit from it.
Speed: closer to DSL (I have seen over 300k, regularly get >200k)
Price: $75/month (from WWC).
Yes, somewhat slower than DSL and somewhat more expensive, but the portability is worth it (and where I live there's no DSL available anyway).
If they manage to get back on track, they had planned an upgrade later this year that would bring average throughput to 400kb, with burst speed over 700kb.
Ricochet has always been a bit conservative about its bandwidth figures. I regularly see speeds of 200kb and higher--they're actually close to 10x CDPD speeds. The technology can easily reach DSL speeds, and Ricochet had planned to expand their network to double throughput with existing modems. And, no per-minute charge, so you can actually get significant work done. They definitely need *much* better marketing...
...and try to get your facts straight. Doug Engelbart was never at PARC, and neither he nor Alan Kay were in the research group that developed ARPAnet. Doug Engelbart's group was at SRI, later moved wholesale to Tymshare, Inc., not sure what happened after Tymshare was bought out by McDonnell-Douglas. Alan Kay's group did invent Smalltalk. They freely acknowledge a debt to Simula in the design of Smalltalk, so Alan Kay most certainly did not invent OOP, though Smalltalk did a great deal to popularize the concept. Dan Ingalls is generally regarded as the chief architect of Smalltalk. _Dealers_of_Lightning_ is the best account I've seen of early days at PARC, acknowledged as accurate by those who were there. Please read it before putting up another article mentioning PARC.