Death of the 3drradio internet

1 byte sequence numbers proved not enough to handle the error rate, so the headers were increased to 3 byte sequence numbers. They would just increase, leaving no question about whether a lower numbered packet was in the past or future. It would take 91 hours for them to wrap around.


That lowered the download speed to 96 kbits/sec. Then there was a case where it would lose the sync bytes & require a hack. After many more corner cases, the USB serial ports finally evolved into the biggest source of lockups. The FTDI board & not the PL2303 was the 1 which 1st died. The write call would freeze until it was unplugged.


If USB serial ports were the standard in the days of massive dialup call centers, they would have become a lot more reliable. That wasn't what happened & the 16550 was the chip which ended up hardened by the call centers of those days.


So the next step would be custom USB interfaces for the radios. It would buy slightly more speed. At this point, having experienced none of the expected range increase, barely usable bandwidth, & pretty lousy reliability, it makes more sense to get an ultra cheap access point from Walmart, extending the range with a waveguide.


96 kbits was still double what GSM or dialup could do. It's too bad you can't buy your own private LTE headend. 3D print anything you want except your own ISP.