Ricochet Bounces Back, Cautiously 162
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."
I totally thought (Score:1)
I live in LA and I have got to say, I really liked the service for the 3 months I had it. This is great stuff -- i remember updating my website from my car when I was early to a meeting.
Yeeha!
Re:I totally thought (Score:1)
Alternative to Wired Broadband? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Alternative to Wired Broadband? (Score:3, Informative)
I remember getting 128k reliably and sometimes getting as much as 256k. When they said 128k, they meant it.
Re:Alternative to Wired Broadband? (Score:2)
I had one thru the City of Martinez for quite some time. Performance was poor, support and service worse. They went under and tried to reclaim their receivers from the city buildings while defaulting on the contracts for all the users. Needless to say their repair truck was ticketed and towed and for some reason the keys to the roof went missing every time the A-holes tried to show up.
Re:Alternative to Wired Broadband? (Score:1)
Expect 25KBs+ downloads while in downtown.
Re:Alternative to Wired Broadband? (Score:2)
Re:Alternative to Wired Broadband? (Score:1)
Ricochet was never really for the desktop. I went out by the pool and worked while my kids went swimming. I worked while at the hospital and chatted with my friends while I was waiting for my prescription. There's nothing wrong with Ricochet. Maybe it's the area you live in.
boo
http://www.geekmom.net
http://www.onlymac
Re:Alternative to Wired Broadband? (Score:1)
Re:Alternative to Wired Broadband? (Score:1)
>some time. Performance was poor, support and
>service worse.
Now *this* is true. Wireless Web Connect, the ISP that Metricom farmed out it's tech and customer support too was simply awful, and IMHO, contributed to Ricochet not being more widely adopted. You were truly alone if you had problem, but luckily I worked them out myself, and when I did, my speeds were very fast.
I'm assuming Aeri are going to take care of the service and support tasks themselves. If they throw it back to WWC forget it.
Re:Alternative to Wired Broadband? (Score:1)
Re:Alternative to Wired Broadband? (Score:1)
Re:Alternative to Wired Broadband? (Score:2, Insightful)
You wouldn't say that if you were like many of us and went through the covand and rythmes madness...and haven't been able to get dsl since.
Re:Alternative to Wired Broadband? (Score:2)
Ricochet is actually a little bit cheaper than what I'm paying, but I have five dedicated IP addresses.
Ricochet might be worth $50 a month if I could go out to Malibu or some similar scenic place and get a change of scene in the computing world.
D
Re:Alternative to Wired Broadband? (Score:1)
Re:Alternative to Wired Broadband? (Score:1)
And as far as using it at home, it didn't work there either, that would have been when the power went out.
Overall I'd give Ricochet a C- when it was up.
Not everybody has access.. (Score:1)
Re:Alternative to Wired Broadband? (Score:2, Insightful)
Where I live, there are ZERO options outside of dialup. I live in Laguna Niguel... a fairly nice area of orange county.
However I guess due to the area (we are in a foothill type area.. lots of hills... my apt is on the side of a hill... the street goes through a vally... etc etc) we are very limited to well.. everything. Our cable company figures it is cheapest to provide cable to us via shared satalite dish. (So for the entire 20 unit building... we have a single dish)...
so cable is obviously out of the question.
We are too far from our phone provider (pacbell) to make use of anything worth while... too far for dsl.. and I still refuse to pay for ISDN... (its not much of an improvement anyways)
So what options are left?
There is satalite... its actually decently cheep but the cost to entry is too high... Not to mention I am in a hotel like apt building
So while there is that... I dont think I want to go through the trouble actually getting it setup just to have a really poor latency. (sucks for games *grin*)
So... whats left... something like wireless broadband would be great (prob microwave) but due to the area... nobody seems to be able to provide it... most likely due to all the hills in the way.. (No line of sight)
So ricochet was REALLY cool... sure a bit pricy but it was worth it....
I was getting downloads of around 27-35KB/s so...
still that beans the crap out of dialup
Re:Alternative to Wired Broadband? (Score:1)
>out at 128kb/s (actual speeds were significantly
>less).
Au contrare. I was a die-hard Los Angeles Ricochet user before they shut it down.
I never saw speeds as low as 128Kbps. With my Aircard 400, I had consistent speeds of 200-300Kbps, with bursts on long downloads to around 320Kbps.
That's about double the speed of ISDN ... wirelessly. It beats the hell out of any other mobile solution you get right now, which is what? Sharing the minutes on your mobile phone for 19.2K throughput?
Sure, it's not cable or DSL, but with a couple of batteries in your laptop, and a Ricochet modem, you have a completely untethered near-broadband connection anywhere you go.
It's a great product, and it's faster than 128K. I'm not sure why they market it at that speed.
Richochet is cool (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Richochet is cool (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Richochet is cool (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Richochet is cool (Score:2)
I think. By the time that happened, I only had one radio. (a Merlin)
-Z
Re:Richochet is cool (Score:1)
Re:Richochet is cool (Score:1)
Re:Richochet is cool (Score:1)
Climbing gear would be too suspicious, plus we want to leave all the gear on the poles, we just want to find out how to make them respond to us and become under our control - then you write a script to do it, and get a cherry picker and run the script on all the poletops to assume control of the network, then it's open and available for public use.
Granted there may be things that make this impractical (not counting the number of nodes you potentially might have to do this on (sayy... Pontiac to Madison Heights and Southfield for example) but in the end it might be worth it if we get the affirmative word that they're not gonna light up DTW again.
damn them! (Score:1)
Life just isn't fair
Question. (Score:1)
Bad, bad pun.... (Score:1)
*Rimshot*
My name's Timothy, I'll be posting stories all week! Don't forget to tip your waitress.
For those who haven't used Ricochet... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:For those who haven't used Ricochet... (Score:2)
Also, if you have to go to a pub to make downloading fast enough to be bearable, you might as well get ISDN, a bottle of Jack Daniels, and some [optional] lubriderm. At least this way, you get to simulate sex with all the chicks you see rather than have to fantasize about it when you get home.
Re:For those who haven't used Ricochet... (Score:2)
Downloading at home was still well over 10KBs, but considering I have an affinity for shepards pie the pub was the best place to go. It was about 2 miles from work, not out of my way, and was a great place to hang out.
Working outside of the office in a place where when you want a break can provide a lot of fun and interested distractions is wonderful. If we had ricochet up here I would try to work remote more often, but I figure there is no difference between my house and the office, except the drive.
Re:For those who haven't used Ricochet... (Score:1)
Re:For those who haven't used Ricochet... (Score:1)
Re:For those who haven't used Ricochet... (Score:1)
they get all the patents, the customers with cards who liked the service (that's me!) and zero debt.
Re:For those who haven't used Ricochet... (Score:1)
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.
Personally, I go to the pub to talk to people and drink beer but hey, whatever turns you on, right?
Jason.
Re:For those who haven't used Ricochet... (Score:1)
Portland, OR (Score:2)
Re:Portland, OR (Score:1)
Re:For those who haven't used Ricochet... (Score:1)
Thanks!
PS. I too once had Ricochet in the Seattle area, and yes it ROX!!
Re:For those who haven't used Ricochet... (Score:1)
They routed all phone lines in through a switch, so they could patch in the secure-access line. What happened, is their switch had a filter to reduce noise. Side effect: kill DSL signal.
Short of wiring a straight line in from the outside no DSL signal was coming through there. Worst part about it, the 5 people that paid to get the DSL installed before realizing why the signal would drop every 30s and never really sync up. It would have been cheaper for me to run a t1 into my apartment than to get DSL.
Already new about it (Score:2)
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.
*sigh* (Score:2, Informative)
Re:*sigh* (Score:1)
How's the latency? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:How's the latency? (Score:2)
Re:How's the latency? (Score:1)
Re:How's the latency? (Score:2, Informative)
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
Re:How's the latency? (Score:2)
Real life experience told me otherwise. I had a friend drive me around while looking at houses, and I was looking at maps while we drove (and IRC'ing) and did not experience any problems with it.
Re:How's the latency? (Score:2, Informative)
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
Re:How's the latency? (Score:1)
I needed USB support in my kernel (2.4, or later 2.2), and I needed to make sure that ACM modem support was compiled in. Once that was done, I had to make sure that a couple of device nodes got created, modprobe, and away I went. Couldn't give you exact instructions at this point, but Google is your friend -- There's at least one page out there with some pretty comprehensive instructions (you might start here [denver.co.us])
Re:How's the latency? (Score:1)
Re:How's the latency? (Score:2)
Latency - 180msec best case, 600+ worst case (Score:2)
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
Re:How's the latency? (Score:2)
I can't wait to get Ricochet so I can replace this ISDN that's sucking a few hundred out of my pockets every month.
(yeah, I live in the middle of Boston and no Cable Modem and no DSL. Thanks Verizon.)
Re:How's the latency? (Score:2)
Yes, Yes, No
Re:How's the latency? (Score:1)
Our best case scenario is aproxamatly 600ms pings just to the far side of the satelite. Add to that 5-10%+ average unavalability, and common 15%+ packetloss and you have a pretty sucky network connection.
I don't pretend to know how the mini-dishes perform. We have 2 different networks routed over seperate circuits and different satelites (irionically the public ISP is routed over the military satelite, and the military network is over a public bird).
Telnet/SSH has about a
Not sure how wireless ISP's do lag wise.
Re:How's the latency? (Score:1)
Re:How's the latency? (Score:1)
I just wish we had never gone BK -- it's a cool technology and there's still nothing out there that works like it did.
Re:How's the latency? (Score:1)
there would be no way that you can play quake/ut/counterstrike or somthing. you would have atleast 220ms added to your ping.
props (Score:1)
PDA modem (Score:2)
or compach flash form factor. I would love to use this service with my PDA.
Re:PDA modem (Score:1)
Public access WLANs (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
what about dallas? (Score:1)
patiently......
i used to have ricochet, and i'll tell ya, there's nothing cooler than streaming real audio christmas songs while driving down the freeway, or getting a map from maps.yahoo.com when you're lost.
Re:what about dallas? (Score:1)
what on *earth* is cool about christmas songs? :-)
What killed ricochet the first time (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:What killed ricochet the first time (Score:1)
Re:What killed ricochet the first time (Score:1)
I have used the older units extensivly, in regular pole-top mode, in point-to-point mode, and in starmode.
Also, the ATS304 register sets the _serial_ speed, either 0 (auto-detect up to 57600) or anything else.
(yes, IHBT, IWHAND..)
Re:What killed ricochet the first time (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What killed ricochet the first time (Score:1)
Why is it whenever I would dial into a poletop and check the setting it would ALLWAYS be set at 9600 baud? Remember, I worked there too, had access to the "special" version of the modem software that allowed me to do this. How the hell do you deliver 56kbps when all your poletops when they are set at 9600 baud?
Hey when did you work there? I worked in tech support when they made us live next to the storage area in the original building. Not sure of the year, my name should explain why
--Toq
Re:What killed ricochet the first time (Score:4, Informative)
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
Re:What killed ricochet the first time (Score:2)
--toq
Re:What killed ricochet the first time (Score:2)
--toq
Re:What killed ricochet the first time (Score:2)
On my machine, /dev/st0 is the first tape device on the SCSI bus (SCSI Tape 0). True it will go (much faster than) 100kbps but what does that have to do with Ricochet? ;)
Re:What killed ricochet the first time (Score:2)
Hmmm....
-Z
Welcome back t0qer. (Score:3, Insightful)
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 [key3media.com]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
Re:Welcome back t0qer. (Score:2)
The 900MHz links are certainly FHSS, the 2.4GHz links probably are, and the WCS links most likely are not.
FHSS is (or at least was) very much a part of the engineering "religion" at MCOM. Rightly so, Direct Sequence systems don't do well in the face of many kinds of interference, and it's not the best approach for unlicensed wireless systems. (Which is why your 2.4GHz phone has such an effect on your 802.11b card.)
Re:Welcome back t0qer. (Score:1, Troll)
Well tech support mainly dealt with stupid user questions, unlike n6mod who I think is a REAL technician. The kind of guy they would tell "Go hunt down this stolen laptop with these special scanners and antenna's!" Really big difference between what we do. You guys are right, I have absolutely no understanding about the network on the level you two do with all your shortwave experience.
I got a +5 on this comment the last time I posted it.
It's sort of a slap in the face to
It's making me think of starting a new kind of troll to overthrow the system. *DEVILISH LOOK* You two are smart enough, here's how you can help.
The current troll purposefully tries to go against the slash moderation system to achieve their goal. They use disgusting links to nefarious sites, act like children really.
What I propose is the karma troll. The karma troll must be smarter than the average troll, because they would have to catalog and sort high modded comments for later "recycling" to recieve karma.
Yes I know it sounds silly, but I think I've figured out the TRUE psychology of slashdot, time to go dig and catalog all those +5 comments
Re:Welcome back t0qer. (Score:2)
Actually, I did sniff out a stolen laptop (actually a stolen van) using the Ricochet Network. If you search for my posts on previous Ricochet topics, you'll find that the owner of that van posted, and I replied.
And yeah, when the early adopters went away, and all I was doing was explaining to people that even though it was a wireless modem, you still had to a) plug it into the wall to charge the battery, and b) plug it into the serial port, I left TS. Did a short stint in SQA before I was laid off (as a direct result of announcing Autobahn. Classic Osborne Effect).
-Z
Re:Welcome back t0qer. (Score:2)
To which they would allways reply, "But It says wireless on the box!"
For some reason, I allways pictured the ricochet's next upgrade to be a few plutonium fuel rods.
So I guess you probably worked with John Chiponis, I liked that guy while I worked with him. There was some dead weight while I worked there, i've been sorta curious what happened to them. 2 names, Jaqueline Schumann and Rick Ried come to mind. Any info on where they went? I know Chiponis went on to become like tech support leader or something, not sure what happened to kaitlin (note kaitlin Imes if you're reading this, thanks for teaching me how the internet works, I went on to have a nice carreer after MCOM)
--toq
--toq
Re:Welcome back t0qer. (Score:2)
Email me: n6mod at milewski dot org
Re:Welcome back t0qer. (Score:2)
Actually, my first statement does hold true, why did MCOM set the 304 register to 28.8kbps, sell the service at 28.8 speeds when, as you said, over the air speed was 100kbps. MCOM did this for years.
It wasn't the techies fault that marketing did this to the company. Ricochet honestly could have been a real contender to ISDN which was new at the time, but someone, somewhere decided it would be better to slowly throttle the modem up to keep in step with whatever the current POTS modem technology was.
I retract what I said, i'm right you sir are wrong. They could have just introduced the high speed in the beginning and cornered the market. Instead they tried to milk the customers. That was a fucked up management decision.
Re:Welcome back t0qer. (Score:2)
For several reasons. Since you seem insistent on pressing this point, here goes:
You don't have any idea how the system works. This magical 304 register that you keep talking about has nothing to do with the speed of the system. The 304 register controlled the serial port speed and the serial port speed ONLY. If the 304 register was set to 28.8, then there would be very, very few computers that would even communicate the modem. You see, 28.8 is not a legal speed for a serial port. Don't believe me? Open Hyperterminal and try to set your serial port to 28800. You can't. 19200 or 38400, but not 28800 or 33600 or any other marketing-driven speed.
You're correct that the 28.8 and 33.6 numbers were driven by the state of the art for POTS modems, but that didn't have anything at all to do with S304, or for that matter system performance. When I was in tech support, I told people to expect 19200, because I believe in underpromising and overdelivering. Marketing didn't like it, but it's not like there was ever any real presence in marketing after Sandy left.
IIRC, the 304 register in the portables was set to ZERO by default. That's right, ZERO. But the modem still worked. Why? Because 304 doesn't have anything to do with the speed of the modem. And, (and you should remember this) if you set that register to 0, it would automatically set the DTE speed to match your computer. Nearly every serial modem sold to consumers does this, and Ricochet was no exception.
The over the air speed was 100kbps. The effective throughput of the system was around 20-30kbps. This was not because of the 304 register.
Besides, if you're correct, the system could never go faster than 9600, because that's what 304 in the poletops was set to. And don't give me the garbage about multiple poletops sending data to a single subscriber. The system would do that under some circumstances if it was running 200 or 201 code, but the 210 code forced all the traffic through the best node. This was done mostly to bound latency; the latency of the network was variable enough that TCP would behave badly, and 210 included a bunch of protocol changes to improve that. (And if you were there prior to 210, you'd know who I am)
So, why was throughput only 30% of the over the air rate? Because that's the nature of half-duplex packet-switched networks. Do you have an 802.11b card? Do you get 11Mb/s out of it? Lucent/DLink/Linksys/whomever must be trying to rip you off! Think back just a bit to 10Mb/s ethernet (10Base-T or 10Base-2). Did you ever get 10Mb/s out of it? Same with 100Base-TX, though things get dramatically better with full duplex and switches. Why is this? Because when you receive a packet, you need to acknowledge it. And in a half-duplex system, you can't be transmitting while you're receiving. And there's turnaround time in the radio. Add to this that latency really was variable over a pretty good range, so the TCP window size was flapping all over the place.
Amazing that Katin let you out of the training room...
You know, the more I think about this, the more I think we had to overlap at MCOM. Were you hired on Newton's watch? You knew Rick and Jax, who bailed out shortly after I left. You knew Chiponis, who started while I was still in TS, and you knew K10, who punched out for SLOtown around that same time. Did you know Noya? Or Kelly? Did you ever work across the street, or in San Jose?
Re:Welcome back t0qer. (Score:2)
Nothing could be farther from the truth.
And if you were there in '96, we certainly worked together.
-Zandr
Re:What killed ricochet the first time (Score:3, Interesting)
Are you sure? My 1995 computer (Compaq Presario CDS 750) had 2 16550 UARTs on the serial ports. Anything more modern than 1993 and which wasn't totally cheap did.
Ricochet vs. CDPD (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Article covering ricochet a little (Score:2, Informative)
he goes into a couple of wireless technologies and discusses the ricochet modems
Now I must wait for this to come(back)to Phoenix! (Score:1)
Now, with my phone line proven to be so poor that I can't get dialup to go faster than 28K (nevermind DSL), and Sprint has proven itself incapable of maintaining a call longer than 2 minutes, and my landlord has forbidden the cable company to dig up 20 ft of driveway to lay cable to me, this looks like the only way I'm _ever_ going to get more than 30Kb!
128Kb/sec, and it's _mobile_, too, for under $50? WOO HOO!!!!!!
Re:Now I must wait for this to come(back)to Phoeni (Score:1)
I'm sure I mentioned that the _best_ my "56K" modem has ever done on the phone line at my apartment is about 26K. I'd be delighted to actually get _one_ honest 56Kbit/sec connection, the possibility of 128K has me jazzed.
Several posters in this discussion claim they achieved Ricochet's claimed 128K, and some even more (200-300K!), so it sounds like, at worst, it's as good as my "56K" modem / phone line which only gets 26K, and at best, it can be many times faster!
Anything similar to Ricochet? (Score:1)
My experience with Ricochet... (Score:2, Informative)
BTW, the Olympics were a riot (no pun intended)! Most fun I've had in quite a while.
Re: (Score:2)
So what about the rest of us? (Score:3, Interesting)
At the very least, I'd like to put the poletops into a friendly mode where they'll pass packets for any customer modem that asks. Even if there's no route out to the internet, some wide-area data service would be great.
Ever lose the ability to use escape sequences? (Score:2)
The sort of stuff that would entice me to be a customer wouild be support for more than just Windows. Office Mac support and maybe unofficial Linux support at the least I would think. Far too often I'm SOL because I have a Powerbook. No one seems to want to support MacOS which seems odd for wireless networking equipment considering you'd figure Powerbook/iBook users would be a pretty big market considering the sort of people who buy them. I've been looking for a means to connect my Samsung 3500 phone to my Powerbook but my only option is a mess of cables and converter boxes that would cost as much as the wireless modem that I don't want to get suckered into buying since I can't figure if the Mac support is shitty or non-existant. Linux support at least on slashdot seems pretty obvious. I think the sort of people who'd pay 50$/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.
Hmmmm.. (Score:1)
Can't tell from their map on the web site if I'm w/in the coverage area though. Probably not...
Re:Ricochet Reprise (Score:1)
Okay, I give up. What tune is that supposed to be to? The closest I could comp up with is 'Kodachrome', but that's a shakey fit at best.
Re:All I'm saying is... (Score:2)
Re:denver? (Score:2)