Review: Highspeed Wireless With Ricochet

N E W   Y O R K, Oct. 26 -- For true high-speed mobile Internet right now, you’ve got to try Ricochet.

About the size of a pack of cigarettes, the Ricochet modem attaches to your laptop and is designed to access the Internet at speeds of 128 kilobits/second — that’s about double the rate of a conventional modem. The Ricochet is a proven technology from San Jose-based Metricom Inc., a company that’s been developing wireless networking products since 1985. Metricom’s initial rollout was on a relatively small, controlled scale. In 1996, Washington, D.C. and Seattle became test cities for the service, which ran at a then-respectable 28.8k speed. TheWashington Post used it to cover President Clinton’s January 1997 inaugural from the streets of D.C.

Radio Communication

Ricochet modems are actually tiny radios that work on the same spectrum as cordless phones and garage door openers — mainly, the 900 MHz band and the 2.4 GHz band. Metricom plants shoebox-sized white radios on top of streetlights in its target cities, with anywhere from five to 60 radios per square mile.

One radio in a 10-square-mile circle is connected to a high-speed landline such as a T1 or T3 lines, commonly used by Internet service providers for corporate connections. (For the concrete canyons of New York, it’s a radio every 2 square miles.) When a user turns on a Ricochet modem, it looks for the nearest lamp post radio and starts sending data. If that lamp post isn’t connected to a landline, it passes the data along to another radio that is. Ricochet said their goal is a “one hop” network — if data has to be handed off more than once, transmission rates slow down.

As they gain users, they add more radios, which boost network capacity. Ricochet ran into trouble in 1997 in a test market in Eugene, Ore., where it had more users than its network could handle. Metricom didn’t add radios fast enough, Metricom senior vice president John Wernke said. The company is more closely monitoring its new networks, adding radios where and when they’re needed, he said.