Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

The Ricochet network. A packet mesh network providing ISDN speeds in the dialup era, wirelessly.

They burned through $5B of 1999 dollars, building out a network in 23 cities, and had effectively zero customers. Finally shut down in 2001.

All their marketing was focused on "mobile professionals", whoever those were, while ignoring home users who were clamoring for faster internet where other ISPs dragged their feet.

Today, 5G femtocells have replicated some of the concept (radically small cell radius to increase geographic frequency reuse), but without the redundancy -- a femtocell that loses its uplink is dead in the water, not serving as a relay node. A Ricochet E-radio that lost its uplink (but still had power) would simply adjust its routing table and continue operating.

I loved my Ricochet modems so damn much. Sitting in a coffeeshop in Palo Alto with an Apple Powerbook and a second generation Ricochet modem rocking web browsing and ssh sessions at 56k when wifi was unknown to the general public. I still have a couple in a box somewhere and I am tempted to see if I can get them into star mode.

Ricochet was super cool. Way ahead of its time. There's even a Joel blog post about it:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/12/20/the-ricochet-wirel...

Wow, I forgot about this.

It was surprisingly great for the time. Apparently I was one of their 4 customers, too!

I had a Ricochet modem in '98-99 living in San Francisco. Just 10 years later the iPhone was launched, on 3G networks that had integer multiples better performance. How would I have been better off had Ricochet survived? This seems like a place where technological progress went --- extremely --- in the right direction.

I can totally see clabretro or cathode ray dude doing a video with you on this

I have a bunch (still not nearly as many as I'd like) and never got starmode working, and they finally dropped it from recent kernels so it'd be a whoooole lot of learning to try again.

But simple point-to-point dialup (using my XP box as a RAS/DUN server) served me well back in the day, even after the network went down, because I put my home node as high up as I could, and it would get me roughly a half-mile radius around the house. Loooong before 802.11ah! It was fast enough for VNC.