very tolerant of delays and errors because wireless data service will be such a novelty in itself. But subscribers will soon decide that they want more than wireless data ser- vice, that they want good wireless data service. Back in 1985, cellular telephones were a novelty, and subscribers tolerated very poor service just to have service at all. This has changed in the voice call arena, and it will change in the data service arena as well. The management of a wireless telephone system should form a very clear picture of the product they are selling, the mix of services, how much they are willing to pay for incremental quality, and how much they are willing to pay for more traffic. This picture is going to be the input to the decision process for the wireless engineers building and maintaining the system. It does not matter that the engineering is first rate if nobody knows what kind of system and service we are trying to offer. 33.9 Reliability in Base Station Design and Layout Base station equipment does not last forever. Any piece of electronic equipment has a maintenance life cycle; it is going to break eventually. To make maintenance matters worse, base stations are often in remote locations. Part of wireless system design is un- derstanding base station maintenance and reliability issues. A base station failure is a service outage. When an antenna face stops working, the subscribers in that cell sector get degraded service from other antenna faces, or they get no service at all. The outage from a broken base station is not a few seconds or even a few minutes but typically is several hours and maybe days. Unfortunately part of the QoS picture we are offering wireless subscribers includes these outages. More reliable base stations cost more money for more reliable components. Each component of a base station can be made more rugged, more reliable, and more likely to operate for a long time without failing. When designing the base stations for a wire- less telephone system, engineers should do a thorough reliab