Ouch !
From: Rose_Campion Friday, Jan 7, 2000 6:15 PM ET
Reply # of 60834
A few thoughts, observations, and data points from reading the MCOM chauvanism here this afternoon -
- I used the Metricom service here in Seattle last year for about six months. It was very reliable and the company seemed professional and well-run. However, the per-packet latency time wasn't great (makes a big difference in telnet sessions, less so just browsing), and despite many, many attempts, I could never get throughput over about 19.2KB (well below the claimed 28.8). This even though I was almost on top of one of the poletop radios with near-perfect signal strength in the urban core. I have seen many other newsgroup discussions of this and it seems to be the general consensus of Ricochet users that one rarely if ever sees the 'up to 28.8kb' performance that's advertised.
- With the service you were 'forced' to use ricochet.net as your ISP (a la a cable modem - I could pass packets through to use my own ISP for mail or news, but I still had to pay MCOM the same amount as if they were my only provider). When 56K service (and then DSL) became widely available for less than the cost of the Ricochet modem, it was a no-brainer to drop them.
- The "new" (as yet not rolled out anywhere, except in beta trials, despite having been in testing for over a year) Ricochet/MCOM network is rated at 128kb/sec. Where does this "256kb/sec" number about come from? Certainly not from the company itself, which is adamant that their new service is limited to the former speed. If we want dueling vaporware, we can have that, but let's stick to what each technology is publicly promising, not what they might have in their R&D labs.
- No matter which it is, will these numbers be as inflated as I found their original "28.8" claim to be in the real world? Even if 128kb or 256kb is achievable, consistently, on a moderately loaded network, and even if HDR achieves only a quarter of its theoretical maximum speed (2mb/sec / 4 = 512kb/sec), it will still be two or four times as fast. Which one you gonna choose?
- The MCOM spamm...ur....'poster' seems to imply that HDR is somehow vaporware, while the "planned, imminent national rollout" of MCOM's service is concrete and real. Sorry, hate to break the news to y'all, but as of today you still can only get the old MCOM "28.8" service, and that only in three (3) US cities. (And not the largest ones, either!) Supposedly by "spring or summer" that's supposed to be twelve cities, great...wonder what percentage of the US population that is? Methinks there's a bit of a dual standard here, that even though both footprints are still on the drawing boards, one is more real than the other? As far as I'm concerned, Metricom's "national, high-speed" network is just as much vaporware (if not more) as a nationwide HDR rollout is.
("If not more": HDR capabilities require only an HDR device and a card changeout in the already-existing carrier's base station. And it uses the already-extant spectrum allocation that the carrier has rights to; there are no regulatory approvals and no other infrastructure to build. What does MCOM have to do to enter a new market? Gee, let's look at their own FAQ on the subject:
"How soon will the Ricochet network be nationwide? Unfortunately, there is no way to predict. In every municipality, we have to acquire right of way permission from the governing organization. This task varies in length, and can take six months or longer, depending on the education process and the willingness and enthusiasm of the community. We are working diligently to obtain this permission from key geographical areas and expand our network quickly."
Translation: Every time Metricom wants to go into a new city (even if it's the next-door suburb of a city they're already in!) they have to enter a separate negotiation process to lease the space on the necessary number of streetlights to place their tranceivers, and pay a lease fee for each one. How many of these poletops does it take to cover an urban area? Think in the several hundreds, not in the dozens...)
That's just a taste. I haven't even gotten to the inablility of Metricom's unlicensed spread-spectrum devices to work well in a truly mobile environment (car on the freeway), nor am I technically qualified to assess the differences in overall network capacity between HDR, 1xRTT, and Ricochet (which "operates in the 902-928 MHz band, divided into 162 channels, each of which is 160 kHz wide. The channels do not overlap", according to the MCOM literature). Nor have we talked about the overall business model (Paul Allen's deep pockets funding the national MCOM rollout, with huge up-front costs and ineveitable early losses, versus the CDMA carriers being able to roll out HDR selectively, and fund it via their existing voice cash-cow business?).
So is this a gorilla game, and if so who's going to be the big hairy beast, and who's gonna end up the chimp? (Remember that besides Metricom and Q, we've got Cisco and their fixed-location wireless data scheme; probably others I'm not thinking of as well). I know which horse (pongrid?<g>) I'd bet on. Others can look at both technologies, the business models, the required investment, and (most importantly) the value chains attached to each company, and come to their own conclusions.
-Rose-
PS: from the company itself, check out:
ricochet.net |
