Ricochet

» see ricochet.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

ricochet sat in the part of internet history i can read about but cannot personally remember. in 1994 i was ten years old in ankara, four years away from my first modem and eight years away from the first internet cafe on my street. wireless internet on lampposts in cupertino was not a category that existed in the turkish imagination yet. it did not really exist in the american imagination either, but at least there were lampposts you could touch.

metricom was founded in 1985 by david elliott and one of the fathers of packet switching, paul baran. it spent nine years building the underlying radio work, then in 1994 rolled out ricochet as a commercial wireless internet service in cupertino. the mesh was made of small spread-spectrum radios mounted on street lights, hopping in the 900 mhz ism band. backhaul ran at 2.4 ghz. by 1996 it covered the san francisco bay area at 28.8 kbit/s. in 1999 it upgraded to 128 kbit/s in select cities, faster than the modem most americans had at home.

paul allen put a controlling stake in metricom in 1997 and pushed the company toward a nationwide rollout. the plan reached atlanta, baltimore, dallas, denver and san diego before the money ran out. by early 2001 there were 51,000 paying subscribers and about a billion dollars of debt. in july 2001 metricom filed chapter 11 and cut power to the network. some of the same engineers, reportedly as volunteers, brought pieces back up in new york during the september 11 emergency response.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the aerie years ~

in november 2001 aerie networks, a small denver broadband firm, bought the ricochet assets at the liquidation auction for roughly $8 million. they picked two cities to keep alive: denver relit in august 2002, san diego in november 2002. for the next five and a half years ricochet ran as a modest regional wireless isp, mostly serving customers who could not get dsl or cable and did not want a cell modem.

~ the final signal ~

on 29 march 2008 aerie sent notice to its remaining denver customers that the service would end the following day. that was the last day the lampposts talked. by the time ricochet finally went quiet, evdo and 3g cell data had taken over the wireless-internet-for-a-laptop use case, and 4g was already in the field.

~ what it was, ten years too early ~

ricochet was city-scale mesh wireless in 1994. the same shape as what municipal wifi projects would try to become a decade later, and what 4g lte would eventually deliver as a carrier product. the technology worked and the timing did not. the billion-dollar buildout arrived just before cell carriers finished their own data upgrades and stopped needing a third-party wireless internet layer.

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