Rrufff, you're welcome. Unfortunately, I live too far from a major metro area to be able to access Ricochet (ie, I'm in the boonies)... not even dsl or cable here... love the open space, though...
In re: Novatel Merlin vs Sierra Wireless card, not sure if it's much of an issue, except at the time you first dial in using the Merlin (versus the SWIR which must do that at the time you boot up, if it's enabled); otherwise, from reports of others there should not be any throughput difference.
We heard the NatSemi chipset would be 'out' in the second half of this year, but I don't know if that's the beginning of beta testing by various mfgrs who might use it in their products, or what. I would not expect to see a product with this chipset this year, just like I had guessed last fall that it wouldn't be until the middle of this Q that we would have volumes of the PC card modems becoming available.
In re: your office WLAN, the 802.11b-based systems offer the greatest max throughput. Note that many laptops are going to include the chipset and a built-in antenna, so no separate PC card modem is required. You'll need to purchase a wireless router, and have a broad wired pipe to plug that into, for internet access. I believe the WLAN routers behave pretty much like ethernet, so the various devices ought to be able to communicate with each other if they are on.
So you would need a separate R2 modem for now. The best solution for Metricom is to market their chipset to various mfgrs of pdas/laptops, and have it embedded just like the 802.11b-based circuits are. The antenna for R2 optimally has different (slightly larger) dimensions, not sure if you'd need a separate plug-in or how much signal loss you'd get by using the current built-ins. (basic dipole is optimum at quarter-wavelength dimension, and R2 uses 900 MHz vs 2.4 GHz for 802.11/Bluetooth/HomeRF systems)
HTH
Rich |
