why not exploit the 16f877's etc onboard USART, then you can just use the simple hsrout and hsrin commands, i think off the top of my head port c.6 and c.7 are your tx and rx. i have had great success and am running an inverter panel communications system off the pics. thats 5 data commands(bi directioinal to the inverters), a copy of the original request and an address, thats to 32 inverters!
works wonders and as a demo i tried a ping of all the pics, managed to overflow the doubleword variable and not have any missing returned packets.

as these pics have hardware USART's they can store a small amount of data (again off the top of my head 8bytes?) and so it gives a small scope for letting the pics catch up to speed (thats if you dont have any forms of hand shake or acknowlege commands).

Chris