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.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
y.
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 don't know what that means.
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.
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
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.
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
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