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, 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 poll-top radios don't have directional antennae, like cellular base stations, they can't detect the direction of 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.
