This is rather complicated, and has to do with the cost of the equipment, the requirements for installing the kinds of equipment which resides outside the home, and how our system operates.
A lot of the time, long-time customers will ask why, when they have been paying their bill on time, should they have to pay to upgrade the equipment? While we would love to be able to provide lower cost or free installations and upgrades, due to the realities of providing wireless broadband internet, the costs for installation, equipment upgrades, and network maintenance are not insignificant.
 Installation Whereas DSL and cable modems can usually be shipped straight to the customer for self-installation or picked up at a regional office, our outdoor equipment requires a trained technician to achieve line of sight by installing equipment on your roof or a tall pole. |  Location Because a vast majority of our service area is in rural central Texas, driving distance from our one, centrally-located office averages 50 miles one-way. |  Transmitters In addition to the wireless transceiver module that actually transmits your data, the module requires an antenna to send and receive a strong-enough signal. |
 Mounting The module and antenna must be mounted on or near your home on a mount, and attached to that mount firmly. Mounting equipment can include one or more of the following: a mounting arm similar to a satellite dish mount, a pole from 5 to 15ft in height, a tripod to secure the pole to a flat or peaked surface, a telescoping mast if over 15ft of height is required to achieve line-of-sight, brackets to secure a pole to the eave of a roof or the side of your home, and guy wires to secure and steady a pole greater than 15ft in height against wind shear. |  Cabling Wires & Grounding Cabling is required to transmit your data from the outside equipment to inside your home. Because the equipment must be properly grounded to protect it from power surges, ground wire with attachment accessories and an outdoor surge protector called a grounding block are required. |  Power & Termination We must penetrate an exterior wall to bring our cabling inside your home, and unless you have a central networking hub in your home we must terminate that cable on the inside with a wall plate. To power our outside equipment, a special power supply connected to the cabling and then to a power outlet is also required. |
 Small Business We are a small, private company with one small office located in northwest Austin. We employ our office staff and field technicians directly, unlike many cable companies which use contractors who are often required to supply their own tools, equipment and vehicles. We are proud to provide our employees with health and workers compensation insurance, and all the tools and equipment they need to do their work. To keep billing simple and straightforward, we use one simple tax rate – Texas State Internet Sales tax, which is regular sales tax on amounts over $25.00 ( See Comptroller Rule 3.366, Internet Access Services http://comptroller.texas.gov/taxinfo/taxpubs/tx96_259.pdf), unlike some larger ISPs which often have hard-to-predict taxes and fees on their statements. We must cover all of our other costs from our regular monthly rate. |  Cost of the Equipment Our service works quite differently than the typical service like DSL or Cable. DSL and cable modems remain inside the house in a controlled environment, and can be manufactured relatively inexpensively. Our service works wirelessly via line of site to a tower, and our equipment is therefore mounted on the outside of your home. That means our equipment has to withstand exposure to extreme Texas heat, to rain, to cold temperatures in the winter, and the curiosity of birds, bugs and other critters. Unfortunately, equipment that can withstand such extreme conditions is necessarily more expensive to manufacture. A typical DSL or cable modem may cost $30 to $50, whereas our wireless radio transceiver modules can cost upwards of $250.00, before accounting for antennas, mounting equipment, cabling, and other accessories. |  Rugged Equipment Unlike cable or DSL internet, which provides wired service via buried underground copper or fiber optic cable directly to your neighborhood, our service is wireless. Just like the equipment we install at your home, our network equipment must also be outdoor-rated, transmit wirelessly over long distances, and be mounted on a network of towers throughout central Texas. Certified tower climbers are required for all installation, upgrade, repair and adjustment of network equipment. Towers themselves must be built or rented. The establishment, maintenance, expansion and upgrading of a wireless network is very capital-intensive. We don’t get the same tax breaks as multi-billion-dollar, multi-national corporate internet service providers, and we don’t carry the ongoing debts those types of corporations tend to carry. |