I can verify that these were the transceivers for the Ricochet wireless ISP
of a few years ago.

I used to be a subscriber. I could run 19K full time at the cheap grade of
service. I was living where it was difficult to add another dialup line at
the time.

They went out of business.

"Phoneguy" wrote in message
t.ca...
I forwarded the photo to an distribution engineer friend of mine at a
nearby power utility. He suggested it could be a remote meter reading
transponder repeater. The technology has numerous ways of doing it, and
low power radio modems are used in some demand metering systems where
individual phone lines are not practical. The transponder gets its power
via the power tap inserted between the lamp body and the light
controlled switch. The nearby low power transponders all report into
their local transponder which in turn relays the reports to a central
gathering station. That's how the system works. Whether or not that is
what it is is yet to be verified.

The antenna's element and coil dimensions look too big to be 2.4GHz. It
does however look right for ISM.

In article ,
says...
I've seen several of these devices attached to the street light poles
in Irvine, CA. Clearly there is some kind of radio inside the box, but
what is their purpose?

http://tinypic.com/6okknl.jpg



In my area "San Diego County" they used to be for a wireless internet
service called Ricochet. They went under a couple of years ago.