-
When LARIAT was about 4 years old, KN Energy (now Kinder
Morgan) announced that it had acquired a Metricom franchise.
-
We investigated Metricom's Ricochet technology:
-
A private herd of cattle enters and dominates the commons!
Dozens of transmitters; each meets power limits, but aggregate power is
high
-
Richochet incorporates an "anti-etiquette." Transmitters
cannot not be made to cooperate with another provider, and increase
output power in the presence of other signals ("swarming")
-
Empirical tests showed that LARIAT's point-to-multipoint
CSMA/CA network would not work in the presence of Ricochet, and could not
be replaced by Ricochet, which provided only 1% of the speed (64K vs 4M)
-
FCC rules would not prevent KN from monopolizing the band.
In Darwinian terms, Ricochet fit into a "niche" in the rules....
-
At first, KN executives refused even to talk to us
-
If we couldn't get an intransigent corporation to cooperate,
we were history
|