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Not Only Is Ricochet Still Around, But It's Been Sold, Yet Again
from the how-do-they-do-it dept
When Ricochet was launched in the late '90s, its cellular modem service for laptops was pretty unique. However, services from major mobile operators quickly passed it in terms of data speeds, coverage and price, and Metricom, the company behind Ricochet, eventually went bankrupt in 2001. Since then, it's traded hands several times, but its owners have never had much success with it -- which is hardly surprising, again, given the way it's been surpassed in nearly every aspect by other mobile broadband services, as well as the proliferation of WiFi hotspots. The surprising part is that Ricochet still exists at all, but it does, and -- brace yourself -- it's been sold again. It looks like the company only offers low-speed mobile service in the Denver area at this point, but it appears to be trying to expand into the WiFi market as well. We would say that it's probably not long for this world since it still doesn't offer much (if any) benefit over other services, but with the way it's managed to bounce around and stay afloat, perhaps we shouldn't.
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It's not the network, it's the concepts.
Terabeam (which owns Proxim and owned Ricochet) just (july 2) sold two patents to undisclosed purchasers. I'm curious which ones they were, and who they went to.
Ricochet's original brain trust left and founded Airespace, which got eaten by Cisco and became the now-widely-deployed Cisco 1500 outdoor mesh accesspoint. Put a Cisco 1500 next to a second-generation Ricochet network radio, and you can't tell the difference. They're literally built into the same aluminum housing.
Their intellectual property is going places, even if the original network isn't.
Personally, I'm interested in using the still-installed poletops as a modest-speed transport network for amateur radio experimentation, among other things.
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u are a geek
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The fact that the company is still being bounced around is somewhat interesting, although, how fun would it be to play with some poletops as "Myself" suggested?
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The tech is still applicable to unlicensed chunks
Someone smart who applied the same techniques to the now-saturated 2.4Ghz band would have themselves a very useful product...
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IRC, one of the reasons Ricochet is still ...
Chris.
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