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Technology Stocks : METRICOM - Wireless Data Communications -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rebel who wrote (1381)	7/11/1999 10:12:00 PM
From: Tai Jin	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3376

I think many households with children already have several phone lines. The phone line is still used for telephone calls. With ADSL you don't even need an extra phone line (it's also faster but costs a bit more). I've got ADSL and it works great. So for me, the only attraction Ricochet offers is mobility with a laptop. I tend to think of Ricochet users as those having laptops (for obvious reasons), and there just aren't that many people with laptops (other than those with a business need or techies). I'd be interested in knowing what percentage of their customers use laptops as opposed to PCs. The three people I know using the service are all using it with laptops. Perhaps the AOL users would be your typical consumer for Ricochet service. But I have a feeling that they are using AOL for the community that it provides. Perhaps a more likely consumer is the one using a basic ISP (providing Internet connectivity with little or no community). Again, the only real advantage I see in Ricochet is the mobility it provides. The only other factors I would consider are cost and whether or not high speed wire based access is available. So I would think that most of their customers use it for the mobility (and that seems to be the way that they've been marketing the service). The mobile market may be large enough to make them profitable, but if they want to sell this service for other mobile devices (like the Palm) then they're going to have to shrink the modem down quite a lot. I certainly wouldn't want to carry around a modem that's larger than the communications device. ...tai