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LARIAT v. Metricom: How We Narrowly Avoided a Tragedy of the Commons

  • When LARIAT was about 4 years old, KN Energy (now Kinder Morgan) announced that it had acquired a Metricom franchise.

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  • We investigated Metricom's Ricochet technology:

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    • 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

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  • If we couldn't get an intransigent corporation to cooperate, we were history