==========================
"Metricom has laid out the Ricochet network so there's roughly one pole-top
radio every square mile. These radios pick up the packets from your wireless
modem and pass them around, pole-top to pole-top, unless they reach a special
radio called a wired access point, or WAP. Here, the packets hop onto a
conventional frame relay network and travel to a standard Internet gateway
located in Houston, Texas."
=========================
Look Ma, No Wires!
Ricochet makes waves with wireless Net access
If you've traveled to San Francisco, Seattle, or Washington, DC, in the past
year, then you've probably seen the advertisements for _Ricochet_, the
wireless Internet service from _Metricom_. Based on 900 MHz spread-spectrum
radio technology, Ricochet offers unlimited Internet access for just US$39.95
a month, with effective speeds somewhere between a 14.4 and 28.8 modem, and no
busy signals.
Three kinds of radios make up the Ricochet network. The first are those
trendy black wireless modems that you can pick up at a computer store.
Designed to clip to the lid of your laptop computer, these radios have a
serial jack that plugs into your laptop machine, a four-hour battery, an AC
adapter, and a whip antenna. (Metricom also sells a 10-foot cable for people
who want to use the modems with desktop machines.)
When you turn on the Ricochet modem, it starts looking on the radio spectrum
for one of the relay radios that Metricom has been placing around its coverage
areas. These radios sit on top of street lamps (Metricom makes an adapter
that powers them from the daylight sensor) and transmit and receive on the
unlicensed portion of the radio spectrum between 900 MHz and 920 MHz.
Metricom has laid out the Ricochet network so there's roughly one pole-top
radio every square mile. These radios pick up the packets from your wireless
modem and pass them around, pole-top to pole-top, unless they reach a special
radio called a wired access point, or WAP. Here, the packets hop onto a
conventional frame relay network and travel to a standard Internet gateway
located in Houston, Texas.
Metricom has priced Ricochet squarely for the consumer market: At $39.95 a
month (really, $29.95 a month plus $10 a month for the modem rental), the
service is $10 to $20 less than the combined cost of a second phone line and
an account with a local ISP. And Ricochet gives you something you can't get
anywhere else: affordable Web surfing without the wires.
Metricom got its start in the wireless meter-reading business. A few years
ago, the company realized it could take its basic radio technology and
redesign it for consumer Internet use. The first system was rolled out in
September 1995. By the end of 1996, more than 9,000 people had signed up,
according to the company.
"It doesn't cost you a dollar a minute like a cell phone," says Matt
Delacruz, age 11, who I met at Macworld earlier this month. Matt works at an
ISP in Oakland, California, and he was playing with a Powerbook 540 and
Ricochet connection.
Like me, Matt thinks the promise of Ricochet is "the fact that you can go
practically anywhere and have a modem." Unfortunately, right now Ricochet
isn't living up to that promise for a lot of its users. The problem is
coverage.
I'm renting a house in Seattle. On the first floor, my wife and I get only 25
percent signal strength using the Ricochet modems. On the second floor, we
get 50 percent signal strength. The more powerful the signal strength, the
faster the system is. This means we're only effectively getting something
between 9600 bps and 14.4 Kbps performance.
Because the Ricochet cells are so small and the modem's power is so low,
small local variations in topology - like a hill, or a metal building - can
make big differences in reception. When users complain about a dead spot,
Metricom can easily fix the problem by installing another radio on another
street lamp. But users must first complain.
Another problem that Metricom is having is getting the go-ahead to put up its
radios in the first place. Some have kept Ricochet out. Others, like Oakland,
California, originally let the radios be installed, but then balked when
Metricom wanted to install more modems to improve its coverage area.
Yet another problem is handoffs between cells. Because Ricochet's pole-top
radios don't have directional antennae, like cellular base stations, they
can't detect the direction of a moving user. Thus, handoffs are not as
graceful as a user moves from cell to cell as they are with the
cellular-telephone system.
Still, there's a lot to like about Ricochet. For starters, Metricom has done
nearly everything right. For example, unlike the RAM and ARDIS modems I
reviewed last week, the Ricochet modem responds to standard Hayes-compatible
AT commands and speaks PPP, which means you can use it with your existing
Windows, Mac, or Unix software.
Because Ricochet is packet radio, you never have to hang up, because an idle
radio doesn't tie up any resources. So having Ricochet is the closest that
most home users can get to a hardwired Internet connection like most
businesses and universities have.
Since the current generation of Metricom radios actually send and receive at
close to 100 Kbps, it's sad to see Metricom only shooting to deliver
middle-of-the-road modem performance. "Eventually we will be faster," says
Greg Dalzell, Metricom's director of product marketing.
Even so, today's Ricochet is pretty fast. Even with the less-than-optimal
coverage I have in Seattle, Ricochet is still great for checking your mail,
downloading files, and light Web surfing. For serious surfing, though, I still
prefer a hardwired modem.
[Simson Garfinkel]