Full Speed Ahead on a High-Speed Internet

As new services are developed, business connection speeds that seem fast today may seem laughably slow in a few years. The same goes for Internet architectures. As a matter of fact, Juniper itself is combining its traditional obsession about speed with an expanded, new focus on building more intelligence and smarter routing into the network as well.

One of the most intriguing perspectives on Internet speed comes from Michael Ritter, the former CTO of San Jose-based Metricom Inc. His company developed the Ricochet wireless modem, which provided Internet connections at 128 KBPS or greater to about 51,000 users throughout the United States. Devotees loved it -- but the company stretched itself too thin in its effort to build a nationwide network and was forced into bankruptcy this past summer.

"We had a huge retail following," Ritter recalls. "Engineers who installed the service liked it so much that they often ended up buying our stock. Near the end, we figured out how to double our speed, to 256 KBPS, just by changing the software. And we had ideas in the lab that would have made it 10 times as fast. We just misread the signals from Wall Street. We spent almost all of our money on a national expansion plan when we should have stayed in a few markets and grown more slowly."

Plenty of other innovators are grumbling about the fickleness of the financial markets. For a while, Wall Street's best thinkers encouraged even the most audacious, pell-mell spending plans -- and then investors abruptly stopped tolerating big losses in the name of growth.

But there's an old-time Wall Street saying that captures the current situation with eerie precision. "You're never wrong," the stock-market adage goes. "You're just early."

George Anders (ganders@fastcompany.com) , a Fast Company senior editor, chronicles the present and the future of the Internet from his base in Silicon Valley.