(This is a reenactment of what my experience was like)
I just discovered that Ricochet ist tot, according to Boing Boing Gadgets, WiFi News, and TechDirt. Wow, I had both the original Ricochet (the brick) and then the later “Crickochet” (because it was much smaller — shown above) and ran it on my Compaq Aero as well as my Apple Mac Duo 230. It connected via serial cable. I lived and worked in Washington, but also was able to spend a lovely Summer in the cafes of Seattle, Washington as well as San Francisco, because they were two other hot zones — the Ricochet Network, which was based on simple wireless antennas affixed to light posts and other placements — the earliest wireless mesh networks. This is back in 1996 through 1998. Maybe it was earlier, I forget. The devices were powerful, fast — was it 128k or so? — at least faster than 28.8-56, anyway. And very very few people would stop to see what I was up to even though having someone web-browsing online in the mid-90s wasn’t that common. Wow, I am a serious geek. It always makes me wonder how come Wi-Max and other wireless solutions are so rare when Ricochet could do this back in 1996. Check out more over on Wikipedia.
(This is the original Ricochet modem, which we called “the brick” and it is attached to a Psion palm-top which is totally what I did — and I was able to to telnet from that little Psion 3a and Psion 5!)
History
Service began in 1994 in Cupertino, California and was quickly deployed throughout the Santa Clara Valley by 1995, the rest of the San Francisco Bay Area by 1996, and to other cities throughout the end of the 1990’s. By this time, the original network had been upgraded, via firmware improvements, to almost twice its original throughput, and was operating at roughly the speed of a 56 kbit/s dialup modem; in addition, Ricochet introduced a higher-speed (nominally 128 kbit/s, in practice often faster) service in 1999; monthly fees for this service, however, were more than double those for the original service.
At its height, in early 2001, Ricochet service was available in Atlanta, Baltimore, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York City and surrounding New Jersey, Philadelphia, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Phoenix, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. Over 51,000 subscribers paid for the service. In July 2001, however, Ricochet’s owner, Metricom, abruptly ceased service. The company filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in August 2001. Like many companies during the dot-com boom, Metricom had spent more money than it took in and concentrated on a nationwide rollout and massive marketing instead of developing select markets (similar to Webvan).
Technology
The technology, deployed by Metricom Inc., worked as a wireless mesh network: packets were forwarded by small repeaters (typically mounted on streetlamps, for the use of which Metricom negotiated agreements with municipal governments) and might “bounce” among several such units along the path between an end-user’s modem and a wired internet access point; hence the name of the service. The wireless ISP service was an outgrowth of technology Metricom had developed to facilitate remote meter reading for utility companies. It was originally inspired by amateur packet radio, but differed from this technology in many respects: for instance, Ricochet used spread spectrum (FHSS) technology in the low-power “license-free” 900 MHz ISM band of the RF spectrum. In addition to the eavesdropping resistance offered by FHSS, modems offered built-in encryption, but this was not turned on by default.
Throughput was originally advertised as equivalent to, and in practice was often somewhat better than, that of a standard 28.8 kbit/s telephone modem. In addition, Ricochet could be treated as an “always-on” connection (in the sense that, once connected to the network, it could stay connected even when not in use without tying up scarce resources, unlike a dialup connection), much the way broadband is today. It was also marketed for a flat monthly fee (the original Ricochet service was $29.95 a month, less than the cost of dialup plus a second phone line). As a result, a significant number of users in the Ricochet service area adopted it as their primary home Internet connection.
Ricochet’s main draw, however, was that it was wireless; at the time, there were almost no other options for a wireless Internet connection. Cellular phones were not as prevalent as today, and wireless data services such as GPRS had not yet been deployed on US cellular networks. It was possible to use specially adapted dialup modems over cellular connections but this was slow (typically topping out at 9.6 kbit/s), expensive (per-minute charges applied), and often flaky. In contrast, Ricochet was fast, flat-rate, and very reliable.
Equipment
Ricochet equipment can sometimes be found on the surplus and used market. The consumer equipment uses license free 1W 900 MHz FHSS encrypted radio modems which respond to standard Hayes “AT” commands. They include a packet-based mode of operation called “star mode” and it is possible to create a point to point connection or even a small independent network with data speeds greater than 256 kbit/s. Some of the infrastructure equipment used 900 MHz for the link to the consumer and used 2.4 GHz for the backhaul link. (A third option, the licensed 2.3 GHz WCS band, was used only in heavily loaded parts of the network and is seldom mentioned in literature.)
External links
- Cupertino deployment
- 1996 technical article on Ricochet’s operations
- Ricochet hackers’ wiki, technical specifics on the network’s hardware and software
