But be prepared to step up your customer service offerings As a kid, I installed their tube two-way radios. How many of you remember that, when you pushed the "transmit" button, nothing was said for the two or three seconds that it took for the dynamotor to get rotating, to deliver high voltage to the transmit tubes? Or advertisements showing a bad guy streaking ahead with the caption "he might outrun the cops, but they can't outrun Motorola?" Or the many of us in younger years rebuilding surplus Motorola rigs for ham radio, and knowing we could always get replacement parts, no matter how old, from Motorola. I'm happy to confirm my comments in the past year that the wireless internet product Motorola has in its Canopy line is first rate. A year ago, I decided to go big time into the wireless internet service. The wirelessbeehive.com website talks quite a bit about what it helps to know. Do know that Canopy is good. It has normal line-of-sight capability within three miles of the base station. With a dish, we get 15 miles. This stuff operates in the "no license required" spectrum at 5.8 MHz, 5.3 MHz, 2.4 MHz and also now in the 900 MHz bands. The higher frequencies won't go through tree leaves. And we don't think much of 2.4 in foliage, but the 900 will — and costs more, too. Do not expect to sell a customer a Canopy unit and sit back and rake in the profits. Do expect to send an installer out to do the install and make their computer work. Do expect to have much greater customer support costs than the next-to-zero expense to maintain a telephone. Do expect to pay big bucks to hire a tech with talents you must have to cope with growth. Do you understand this answer to a customer query? FOR EXAMPLE: Rick asked: How come my <wirelessbeehive> speed for download goes from approx. 80kb's to less than15kb's whenever I'm downloading anything larger than 6meg? Chuck opines: You have to watch for big K vs. little k and big B vs. little b. Big B = bytes, little b= bits. There are 8 bits per byte. 8x16K = 128K Big K = 1024, little k =1000. Not too much difference there but it's there. The basic wireless plan speed of 128 kbps is the exact same thing as 16kBps. So, for $30/month, you get16KBps (128 kbps) connection with burst capacity up to 3.3Mbps. The system will shift down to the basic speed you are paying for after it hits the download limit of about 5 MB. Many times the progress bar of a loading program will show things in bytes per second instead of bits per second. Expect it to go from 80KBps to about 16KBps after about 5 MB. Thus you are downloading at a burst speed of 1.6Mbps. If you stop the download, the system can reset. After a few minutes the system will allow the higher speed. But if you continue to download or stream large quantities of data, it will continue to shift you down to the speed you pay for. If you subscribe to a higher speed plan, not only will the download progress at twice this speed, it will not shift into low gear until you have downloaded 10 Mb. So $10 more per month gets close to four times the performance capacity CELL CHURN In some countries, nearly all high school kids pack a cell. In America the figure is less, but kids and educators I polled suggest 2 or 3 out of 4 carry. And most have their school (pay) phone numbers in memory. Most exceed minimum, no-fee text messaging. A marketing bonanza for a carrier to offer unlimited text messaging? Nail that market, and they won't leave for competitive fancy minute deals. It's what the kids want.   © Beehive Telephone Co.