Review: Highspeed Wireless With Ricochet

N E W   Y O R K, Oct. 26, 2000 -- 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.

In tests in New York, Ricochet lived up to its promises. Installation was quick and painless — plug the modem into a laptop’s modem port and stick it on to the back of the computer with the optional Velcro strips. Data transfer rates hit 14 kilobytes/second, triple the speed of a 56k modem.

The company hopes to double the speed of the service next year, said Wernke.

You can’t buy a Ricochet from Metricom, by the way. The company has licensed its technology out to five service providers: Juno Express, Wireless Web Connect, WorldCom, UUNET, and GoAmerica are all already selling the service. It’s the same physical service; they just differ on support, pricing and certain other policies, Wernke said.

Stray Bullets?

One of the big downsides to Ricochet is a limited market. Right now, it only works in nine major U.S. metropolitan areas — though the company plans to add one to four more around the end of this year and to reach a total of 46 by the end of 2001.

The modems are fine for laptops, but too bulky for palm devices, though Metricom promises PC Card-sized modems by the end of the year.

But probably the biggest problem with Ricochet is its price: the modem costs between $99 and $300, and the service is $70-80 a month, pricing it out of the range of most consumers. (Ricochet charges its licensees around $30/month, so the licensees are making a pretty hefty profit.)

Ricochet also has one bizarre “feature.” Because it uses the same radio spectrum as cordless phones, a cordless phone receiver within a few inches of a Ricochet will make clicking noises as the data packets fly. Stray packets from Ricochets also squelch nearby speakerphones and bother cheap computer speakers. There’s no security issue involved — the packets just show up as meaningless clicks — but it’s annoying.

“We use spread spectrum technology and everything we can to get our speeds up, so we tend to be one of the noisier devices in the spectrum we operate,” Wernke said.

Location, Location, Location

The Ricochet network can physically locate every modem to within a block or so, which opens up the possibility of location-based services in the future, Wernke said. Users could find nearby restaurants, ATMs — or receive targeted ads from businesses that make deals with their Ricochet ISP.

“[The service] could say: you’re three blocks from a McDonald’s, and it’s 39-cent hamburger day,” he said.

Metricom’s perhaps a little overconfident in its data security — though they allow encrypted links, they don’t default to using encryption. But the Ricochet signal “spectrum hops” to different channels constantly, which would deter most data thieves, and many corporate users will be using virtual private networking software with built-in encryption. Ricochet is certainly more secure than your typical phone line connection.

Metricom is less assertive about privacy, leaving it up to its licensees.

“We think one of the things people will differ on is reading the privacy policies of the service providers,” Wernke said.

Targeted Ricochet

Forrester Research analyst Amanda McCarthy said Ricochet won’t find a mass market.

“The general user wouldn’t pay 50 or 60 bucks extra for mobile access,” she said. “[And] not everybody’s toting a laptop around.”

Jerry Purdy, president of consulting firm Mobile Insights, sees the price of Ricochet service dropping within a year or two.

Wernke projects growth from the current 40,000 subscribers to 600,000 by the end of next year. Bosses will pay for the service for now, he said, admitting that it’s a “terrible” value for individual consumers.

“It is absolutely designed for the mobile professional, who needs that access to gain competitive advantage,” he said.

Metricom is considering new pricing structures for consumers and handheld device users, he said.