Well, they were originally in the remote-read electric meter business. I have some semi-cool technology that can do precise metering very cheaply. I met with the guru Baran and - many times - with the prez, Dilworth, and the engineers. They had serious doubts that my thing actually worked - some trig-ignorant guys said flat-out that it couldn't - so I did some semi-elaborate demos and customized my uP code for their weird tests. It all worked. I proposed licensing my stuff to them for 10% of what it would save them and they said, "No, but how would you like to be a consultant?" Pricks.
They actually never wanted to be in the meter business; all the engineers were Ham radio guys and seemed to think that measuring 60 Hz was trivial and annoying. Plus the usual NIH of anybody outside having a better idea.
The meter they designed was an expensive crock, and nobody would buy it, so they became a Wireless Internet Company (which the hams preferred) and burned through a bunch of presidents and hundreds of megabucks and died.
Funny, I have a friend who had a very similar experience with Cellnet, or Smellnet as he calls them.
I don't know any stories about Metricom after they switched to the Ricochet thing; any good gossip about what they did wrong?
I think I actually saw a guy in a cafe using a laptop with a Ricochet. Once.
But is/was there an actual money-making market for wireless internet connections? This neighborhood is full of WiFi cafes and all that, and even when it's free nobody is sitting and surfing, as far as I can see. People talk or read books or read newspapers in public places. I think the idea of surfing the net 24 hours a day is over.
Anymore, I rarely take a laptop with me when I travel.
Instead I bought _myself_ an IPOD Mini when I bought a bunch of them for the grandkids at Christmas... loaded it up with "The Da Vinci Code", and had a relaxing trip last week to Pittsburgh ;-)
...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | |
| E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat |
| http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
Well, the CA3046 went, but Intersil still makes NPN transistor arrays of higher performance. The HFA3046, for example, is in the SOIC package and the transistors have a ft of 8 GHz. Costs 20 times as much as a CA3046!
The 74HC4046 is a lot faster but yes, you'd have to stay clear of that hook. Also, the linearity isn't sufficient for most of my apps. At least for V/F conversion. Then again much of those tasks are slowly migrating to micro controllers.
These were popular for a while. But when you have to go through the trouble of building active external stuff around a VCO you are often pretty close to scrapping the chip and building the whole thing from discretes. That's what I ended up doing a lot. An upside was the much lower power consumption. These LS VCOs often guzzled around 20mA and with some of them the purchasing folks ran into the dreaded "allocation" issues. Not so with jelly bean discretes.
Mostly it was average folks who worked hard that got whacked.
why
I was a radio engineer.
That is where the name sourced.
Meter Communications == Metricom
That is funny.
The last of the Hams were gone not too long after I got there (early 1998).
It was Dilworth's idea.
The short story is that they shot themselves in the foot with an impossible nationwide buildout plan for Ricochet 2 -- they ran out of money.
The major investors, Paul Allen and MCI (to the tune of 700 to 800 $mil, depending upon how you count it) insisted on a nationwide buildout timeline that was essentially unrealistic. That is, it appeared to me that they would only make the investment contingent upon Metricom buying into a rapid buildout. The aggressive buildout timeline--built into the investment contract--effectively forced Metricom to burn through tons of cash rapidly. They were making a near attempt to "light up" the entire nation instantaneously.
One of the major problems with this is they never gave themselves time to figure how to market Ricochet or how to price it. Again, they ran out of cash just as they were beginning to figure it out.
Also, they spent way too much on network hardware. I don't think Network Ops had even 50% of the network hardware installed (much less up and running) by crash time. When Aerie Networks bought the non-installed hardware and all IP (for $8.25 mil) they trucked it all to Oklahoma in over 500 semi-trucks. Talk about excess inventory. The system hardware that was produced en masse never made it to the so-called "cost cutting phase" of design development because of the "build out quickly nationwide at any cost" mentality. Put concisely, this made the hardware cost at least double what it should have been, again draining money like a sieve.
The bottom line: The directive was to take a small 200 person company in Los Gatos and build a $1 bil (or more) advanced radio communication system nationwide in a period of about 1.5 years (maybe 2), and all the marketing and revenue generating that must necessarily rapidly follow. No one can grow that fast and be successful for any realistic amount of investment. The "plan" was crazy and flawed at its root, despite certain executive management problems that did exist during the massive network inventory over production.
I think this ended up being about a $1.5 bil train wreck.
It actually worked pretty well. A good technology got snuffed out by a crazy plan.
ONLY 12 GHz fT? I've recently been working with 35 GHz fT NPN's ;-)
...Jim Thompson
-- | James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens | | Analog Innovations, Inc. | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | | | E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat | |
formatting link
| 1962 | I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
I have some samples of BFP520, which is a 45 GHz SiGe npn, probably the fastest surface-mount transistor around. But I work in time domain, got no use for sine waves, and it's pig-slow as a switch for some reason. Discrete PHEMTs really scream.
The intial idea was not "surfing," although it could obviously be used for that. At first, they thought the main customers would be businesses. It was to be nationwide network (really covering all major metro areas, but not rural) where a subscriber could connect anywhere anytime in the same manner.
For example, suppose a Sales Rep from San Diego was giving a presentation to a potential customer in a conference room in Boston. The customer has a question for which the Sales Rep has no local (Boston) information. The Sales Rep, through VPN, can access the San Diego company servers just as if he/she is in the San Diego office. The question is answered rapidly. Emails come right through too, in the normal sense. There is no perceptual difference whether the user is in San Diego, Boston, or Chicago O'Hare. The user keeps the computer on standby, finds a moment to open it, and connects in under 10 seconds, the same way everywhere. The same goes for when the business person goes to their hotel room for the evening. They are completely insulated from any particular connection issues of diverse hotels/motels. They can do the same thing for the next day's sales visit.
That was an example of the mobile business user idea. Many business people who--by the nature of their business--were on the road in a *single* metro area absolutely loved the service. It was a very efficient comm link for them, which they conveniently could move to the home office (or anywhere else) for the evening, if desired.
Of course, part of the problem was the singular focus on business users. Many non-business (consumer) users don't have access to DSL or Cable connections. Of course, these areas are shrinking over time, but nonetheless there was and is potential revenue from non-business users. The Ricochet connection allows a home phone line to be dedicated to voice or fax. The idea that the home consumer user is not physically tethered to a room or even a single neighborhood could still have some value add even for folks that may not needing mobility
*often*.
Suppose a student shares a house with 7 others and share one phone line. Ricochet allows independent rapid connectivity for the student, whether at home or studying in the library at school with their laptop. Police and fire could use data service too. In fact, *any* sort of data services could be supported. It is up to the imagination of the *users*. The subscriber device simply needs to be cheap.
Metricom Marketing had too narrow a focus imo. They actually began figuring out what it took to break consumer resistance, and how to market Ricochet with some test programs in the San Diego market. But it was too late--way too much debt, not enough current revenues, and shrinking cash reserves caused creditors to put the hammer down.
I also forgot to mention another practical problem with the nationwide plan of building out the network. They tried to do it all over the country almost simultaneously. There was not enough network building experience base for Ricochet 2. Like any complicated process, it is nice to find all the process hitches in a "test run" (smaller scale) before taking it to higher volume. That is, I believe they should have built out the SF Bay Area system first because this would help refine process issues and build personel experience base. (Metricom was based in the SF Bay Area, so this seems geographically obvious.) The technical network personel base can then take these learned process improvements, and their practical learned experience, and diffuse that to multiple metro areas as appropriate.
As it was, all mistakes were made everywhere, thereby multiplying the cost of problems. The same goes for marketing, they needed to figure it out in the SF Bay Area first, before incurring the error multiple of cost. They gave themselves no chance of success. Executive staff, major investors, and the BoD were in way over their heads, and it showed.
It was a rather spectacular wreck. To answer your question, I don't know if the idea could have been ultimately successful. The users who did have it really seemed to like it. I do know it was never given a reasonable (fair) chance of discovery due to boneheaded unrealistic planning. If it were destined to fail, it did not need to fail on that big of a scale.
I read in sci.electronics.design that gwhite wrote (in ) about 'Your favorite 10 analog IC's', on Fri, 18 Feb 2005:
Second phase: change the delighted-user name in the ads to 'Rick O'Shea' and launch in Boston and New York. (;-)
--
Regards, John Woodgate, OOO - Own Opinions Only.
The good news is that nothing is compulsory.
The bad news is that everything is prohibited.
http://www.jmwa.demon.co.uk Also see http://www.isce.org.uk
Maxim has a couple of precision Bipolar Arrays (QuickChip on 27GHz GST-2 process) they got when they bought the old IC manufacturing line from Tektronix.
I read in sci.electronics.design that Jim Thompson wrote (in ) about 'Your favorite 10 analog IC's', on Fri, 18 Feb 2005:
Should be good enough for audio, for non-critical listeners.
--
Regards, John Woodgate, OOO - Own Opinions Only.
The good news is that nothing is compulsory.
The bad news is that everything is prohibited.
http://www.jmwa.demon.co.uk Also see http://www.isce.org.uk
It's hard to win pissing matches of this type. If you use 35GHz parts, someone else is using Infineon's old 45GHz parts. They in turn have to yield to the folks using three-year-old 75GHz PI-HEMTs. And they yield to the folks using 100GHz parts, and they yield ...
For example, a bit of browsing turns up 3ps SiGe bipolar technology now in production, and that's likely not the fastest stuff around.
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