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April 19, 2004

MetroFi: Ricochet's Second Coming?

MetroFi looks like Ricochet done right: high speed, ubiquitous coverage, right price: Many people have given Paul Allen grief over the years for his failed investments in digital ideas. Trouble is, Allen has the futurists' dilemma: he has the right idea, but he's too early. Metricom's Ricochet is a great example. While billions were spent and lost--not all his--Ricochet's fundamental idea was dead on: wireless bandwidth with fixed monthly costs throughout an area.

Ricochet, unfortunately, was limited at the time to widespread but not full-scale availability in certain cities, which meant that if you weren't in the right spot, you had no coverage or slower service; a relatively high monthly price until the very end; and a relatively slow modem-like speed, with their 128 Kbps or so service not available until the very end and then only in a few places. (Ricochet's been revived in a couple of cities with a somewhat higher-speed offering.)

You can spin the dials of ubiquity, mobility, price, and bandwidth to come up with lots of different combinations. Home DSL and cable modems can serve a good majority of the country, but the bandwidth-to-price ratio isn't superb (it's fine), and it has no mobility.

Cell data has mobility, but only lower speeds have ubiquity. The price is too high for consumers, and cell phones tend to work more poorly inside homes and buildings. Bandwidth will increase, but upload speeds may remain very low for years to come, even as 1 Mbps downstream speeds become common.

MetroFi might have the right combination of those dials' settings: they plan to offer about 1 Mbps access to most of the 40,000 homes across 20 square miles of Santa Clara, Calif., for $20 to $30 per month using Wi-Fi. They'll have near ubiquity without full mobility, but the price and bandwidth are dead-on competitive. They're even hanging Ricochet-like repeaters from light posts.

They claim that self-installed kits will work for most users, but it's the truck rolls that kill earnings. Their trials must have been very successful. MetroFi's model is similar to AiirMesh, which launched coverage through the less-economically-booming Los Angeles-area town of Cerritos (about nine square miles).

Telcos and cable companies have locked up the wireline market, so it's only natural for competition to find its way out through methods that avoid the regulated copper. It's proven impossible for competitive data providers to work in the wireline world--Covad excluded, even though they went through bankruptcy to reach their state today.

MetroFi is trying to fight wire with wireless, and only a real deployment will determine whether it can compete. The fervent hatred that many consumers have for larger firms may play into MetroFi's hands if they can deliver a consistent experience at the price they plan to offer.

Also notable: Don't miss Steve Stroh's sardonic top ten list in which he enumerates how MetroFi "can't" fail.