The Ricochet network had continued to operate in Denver, passing through multiple hands, until its death March 28: I feel like playing taps. The Ricochet network, started up by Metricom, which spent billions and sold some assets for pennies on the dollar, was closed by Civitas, a company formed by the president of then-owner Terabeam's Ricochet division. The Ricochet site notes service halted on March 28.
The company claimed 6,000 users as of last August, but it seemed like a hard row to hoe competing as it was essentially against 2G/2.5G cellular data service that can be had for a pittance through embedded devices and cards. I tried to reach the company, and while its phones still work, the Civitas voice tree hangs up when you try to reach a real person, and Ricochet's tells you the network is shut down, and directs you to their Web site.
When I wrote about the sale in August 2007, I noted that Civitas was claiming "a decade of experience operating large-scale wireless deployments," which was specious. I noted, "That’s only true if you count some of the equipment mounted in Denver as continuous employees of the company."
Goodbye, Ricochet, an idea first way ahead of its time, and then way, way behind it.
Ricochet was a real dot-com story. I think in one year, Metricom's stock ranged from $2 to $104 or so.
I did right of way work for Metricom, and for the short time when the system was running in my area, it was great. You could surf in Starbucks before they had wifi.
I would not be surprised to see WiMax operators start to add repeaters so that their model starts to look like Ricochet's.
This is a really sad end to a great product. I remember beta testing and then supporting this for MindSpring / Earthlink back in the day. A friend of mine pointed me to this article because :
"This reminded me of a decade ago, when I was in ATL, and I'd call you on your cell and you were driving around town, with your laptop, listening to streaming MP3s, thanks to Ricochet.
Long live the king,
Jon"
hear, hear.
I still have a Ricochet wireless modem that served as interim bandwidth for the dot-com I was working for in the early decade in Atlanta as we moved offices. We put it on a desktop running some third-party router software, and successfully keep operations running for 15 people.
Good times. For people with Ricochet hardware - you can still run a point-to-point peer network using them, if you're into that kind of thing.