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John Larkin
Guest
Wed Jan 18, 2012 11:52 pm
On Wed, 18 Jan 2012 14:31:18 -0800 (PST), Simon S Aysdie
<gwhite_at_ti.com> wrote:
Quote:
On Jan 18, 1:43 pm, John Larkin
jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
On Wed, 18 Jan 2012 12:44:41 -0800 (PST), Simon S Aysdie
gwh...@ti.com> wrote:
On Dec 20 2011, 6:03 pm, John Larkin
jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
They were so in love with their Ricochet technology that
they couldn't see that it didn't scale.
It scaled just fine. Metricom didn't fail because of the technology.
What happened when a lot of people got online? (if they ever did!) I
could imagine one unlucky user accidentally being the choke point for
300 others.
Quote:
It was, what, 38 kbaud if everything was right?
That's Gen 1 Ricochet speed.
Gen 2 Ricochet was ISDN (128bps) speed. Practically, I would
regularly get 200+ in San Jose. And it was always on. (Remember that
it was the time when a lot of people were still dialing in for 56k.)
Real work was being done for Gen 3 Ricochet @ 1Mbps. These speeds may
sound slow now, but it certainly wasn't then for wide area wireless
data networks.
Now it could be that it may have failed technologically eventually.
But we'll never know.
I've never been a ham. I did do this one:
http://www.qsl.net/n9zia/metricom/metricom-900.jpg
What is that?
The 900 MHz transceiver in the poletop/ethernet microcell.
Looks expensive.
It was, I suppose.
We were making good progress stripping costs out. What you see is the
first cut and "just make it work, and ignore costs" was the first
edict. We were to take costs out later. But they built more than
100,000 of them in the form you see in the rush to put them into
storage and go bankrupt.
I think I saw one Ricochet modem, once. A guy had one attached to his
laptop, in a cafe on 9th and Irving. It was big.
John
Simon S Aysdie
Guest
Thu Jan 19, 2012 12:31 am
On Jan 18, 1:43 pm, John Larkin
<jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
Quote:
On Wed, 18 Jan 2012 12:44:41 -0800 (PST), Simon S Aysdie
gwh...@ti.com> wrote:
On Dec 20 2011, 6:03 pm, John Larkin
jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
They were so in love with their Ricochet technology that
they couldn't see that it didn't scale.
It scaled just fine. Metricom didn't fail because of the technology.
It was, what, 38 kbaud if everything was right?
That's Gen 1 Ricochet speed.
Gen 2 Ricochet was ISDN (128bps) speed. Practically, I would
regularly get 200+ in San Jose. And it was always on. (Remember that
it was the time when a lot of people were still dialing in for 56k.)
Real work was being done for Gen 3 Ricochet @ 1Mbps. These speeds may
sound slow now, but it certainly wasn't then for wide area wireless
data networks.
Now it could be that it may have failed technologically eventually.
But we'll never know.
Quote:
The 900 MHz transceiver in the poletop/ethernet microcell.
Quote:
Looks expensive.
It was, I suppose.
We were making good progress stripping costs out. What you see is the
first cut and "just make it work, and ignore costs" was the first
edict. We were to take costs out later. But they built more than
100,000 of them in the form you see in the rush to put them into
storage and go bankrupt.
Simon S Aysdie
Guest
Thu Jan 19, 2012 1:17 am
On Jan 18, 2:52 pm, John Larkin
<jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
Quote:
On Wed, 18 Jan 2012 14:31:18 -0800 (PST), Simon S Aysdie
gwh...@ti.com> wrote:
On Jan 18, 1:43 pm, John Larkin
jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
On Wed, 18 Jan 2012 12:44:41 -0800 (PST), Simon S Aysdie
gwh...@ti.com> wrote:
It scaled just fine. Metricom didn't fail because of the technology.
What happened when a lot of people got online? (if they ever did!)
The speed expectation was according to expected density (things like
users per microcell and # of hops to the ethernet radios).
The point is, the architecture allowed it to scale easily, at least in
principle. Just add density of microcells and ethernet radios as
users are added.
That is: micro > nano > pico. Scale it -- it was designed to do that.
Quote:
I could imagine one unlucky user accidentally being
the choke point for 300 others.
I don't know what that means.
Quote:
I think I saw one Ricochet modem, once. A guy had one attached to his
laptop, in a cafe on 9th and Irving. It was big.
The picture wasn't a user modem. The modems weren't that big.
Maybe it was "big" as opposed to none-to-few alternatives (and the
very few others always had slower data rates, even compared to Gen 1).
But I don't think that counts, since something compared to nothing is
hardly fair. There was already a PCMCIA modem at the time of the
bankruptcy.
Like I said, Metricom may have eventually failed for technological
reasons. But Metricom was dead before that could ever be known.
John Larkin
Guest
Thu Jan 19, 2012 1:42 am
On Wed, 18 Jan 2012 15:17:25 -0800 (PST), Simon S Aysdie
<gwhite_at_ti.com> wrote:
Quote:
On Jan 18, 2:52 pm, John Larkin
jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
On Wed, 18 Jan 2012 14:31:18 -0800 (PST), Simon S Aysdie
gwh...@ti.com> wrote:
On Jan 18, 1:43 pm, John Larkin
jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
On Wed, 18 Jan 2012 12:44:41 -0800 (PST), Simon S Aysdie
gwh...@ti.com> wrote:
It scaled just fine. Metricom didn't fail because of the technology.
What happened when a lot of people got online? (if they ever did!)
The speed expectation was according to expected density (things like
users per microcell and # of hops to the ethernet radios).
The point is, the architecture allowed it to scale easily, at least in
principle. Just add density of microcells and ethernet radios as
users are added.
That is: micro > nano > pico. Scale it -- it was designed to do that.
I could imagine one unlucky user accidentally being
the choke point for 300 others.
I don't know what that means.
The data packets were relayed from user modem to user modem
("Ricochet"), until it found its way to a tower, the things you
designed. If you were the only guy in range of a tower, and there were
300 other users that could only get to the tower through you, there
would be a bottleneck. That could have nasty statistical behavior,
especially in startup days when the microcell density was low.
John
John Larkin
Guest
Thu Jan 19, 2012 10:20 pm
On Thu, 19 Jan 2012 12:36:51 -0800 (PST), Simon S Aysdie
<gwhite_at_ti.com> wrote:
Quote:
On Jan 18, 4:42 pm, John Larkin
jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
On Wed, 18 Jan 2012 15:17:25 -0800 (PST), Simon S Aysdie
gwh...@ti.com> wrote:
On Jan 18, 2:52 pm, John Larkin
jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
On Wed, 18 Jan 2012 14:31:18 -0800 (PST), Simon S Aysdie
gwh...@ti.com> wrote:
On Jan 18, 1:43 pm, John Larkin
jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
On Wed, 18 Jan 2012 12:44:41 -0800 (PST), Simon S Aysdie
gwh...@ti.com> wrote:
I could imagine one unlucky user accidentally being
the choke point for 300 others.
I don't know what that means.
The data packets were relayed from user modem to user modem
("Ricochet"), until it found its way to a tower, the things you
designed.
This is not a true statement. If you can't "see" a poletop, you don't
get in. (There was ad hoc mode of modem to modem if you knew how to
set it up, but that is not what Metricom was selling.)
Oh. The meters worked that way, or at least that's what they told me.
Hence the name Ricochet. Some of today's smart meters do the mesh
thing, too.
John
Quote:
A user's packet could, however, hop from poletop to poletop to get to
the ethernet radio (where the packet then went wired). If in range of
the ethernet radio, then a user's packets would never even see a
poletop.
The system goal was no more than 1-hop (typical, and that means the 1-
hop was from poletop to ethernet). That goal was largely met -- data
showed that is what most users got.
Simon S Aysdie
Guest
Thu Jan 19, 2012 10:36 pm
On Jan 18, 4:42 pm, John Larkin
<jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
Quote:
On Wed, 18 Jan 2012 15:17:25 -0800 (PST), Simon S Aysdie
gwh...@ti.com> wrote:
On Jan 18, 2:52 pm, John Larkin
jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
On Wed, 18 Jan 2012 14:31:18 -0800 (PST), Simon S Aysdie
gwh...@ti.com> wrote:
On Jan 18, 1:43 pm, John Larkin
jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
On Wed, 18 Jan 2012 12:44:41 -0800 (PST), Simon S Aysdie
gwh...@ti.com> wrote:
I could imagine one unlucky user accidentally being
the choke point for 300 others.
I don't know what that means.
The data packets were relayed from user modem to user modem
("Ricochet"), until it found its way to a tower, the things you
designed.
This is not a true statement. If you can't "see" a poletop, you don't
get in. (There was ad hoc mode of modem to modem if you knew how to
set it up, but that is not what Metricom was selling.)
A user's packet could, however, hop from poletop to poletop to get to
the ethernet radio (where the packet then went wired). If in range of
the ethernet radio, then a user's packets would never even see a
poletop.
The system goal was no more than 1-hop (typical, and that means the 1-
hop was from poletop to ethernet). That goal was largely met -- data
showed that is what most users got.
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