ECI To Provide Helpdesk Services For Prairie iNet

ECI announces their newly formed partnership with Prairie iNet, a Midwestern Wireless Internet Service Provider, to provide third-party helpdesk support.

On July 11th, ECI began its 24x7 helpdesk support for the rapidly expanding Prairie iNet, allowing them to more easily meet the needs of its customers located in over 125 rural communities in Iowa, Illinois, Kansas, and Nebraska. Prairie iNet offers wireless connectivity to Internet customers in rural areas who, in the past, have only had slower dial-up connections available to them. Prairie iNet calls this concept WRAN, Wireless Rural Area Network.

ECI has been a third-party technical support provider for several years working with leading consumer electronics manufacturers, such as Sony and TDK. In 2000, ECI felt it should expand to support Internet Service Providers. For many growing ISPs, providing technical support in-house is often time consuming, costly, and bothersome. Outsourcing technical support to a third-party is a cost effective solution for many of these companies, and ECI recognized that there was a need for this type of service.

The established infrastructure at ECI includes telephone, email, and World Wide Web support. ECI also tailors service options to meet the needs of each ISP. These include 24 hour a day support, market research, reporting, and performance benchmarking ECI provides transparent identity" support, taking on the partners identity, so users arent aware they are speaking with a third-party representative.

ECIs technical support center is located in the West Central Iowa town of Manning. Recently, a 20,000 square foot facility was built in Manning to take advantage of the strong work ethic and educational level of the work force. The cooperative effort between ECI and the city of Manning, has added many new jobs to the area.

Prairie iNet began building communication networks in April 2000 and currently offers high-speed wireless Internet access to communities in several Midwest states. Based in West Des Moines, Iowa, Prairie iNets networks are primarily located in Iowa and Illinois with current expansion into Kansas, Nebraska, and Minnesota. Prairie iNet is, in their words, Bringing the fast lane to Main Street America."