WIConnect Wireless continues to grow for several reasons.   First I believe that we have a dedicated, committed staff that works hard to be able to service our customers.   That staff is regularly faced with many challenges but remains resilient to those challenges.   In 2012 we will work hard to face our government backed competitor and other competitors head on.   We will provide customer service and local support that is second to none.    With this support and service we intend to keep our existing customers as well as to continue to add new customers to our growing family. 

In order to continue to keep our small staff committed and working with our customers best interests in mind we need to continue to improve our internal systems.    Our management and accounting applications need to be improved to allow for a more streamlined customer experience and more efficient processes for our employees.

We need to continue to improve and build out our network infrastructure.  This infrastructure will need to continue to provide more bandwidth and speeds to our new and existing customers.   We hope to be able to do a bandwidth upgrade for all of our customers across the board in 2012 while keeping pricing options the same.  

We will provide a solid telephone solution for our existing wireless customers that will allow them to save money over the existing phone service that they are paying for from their national provider.  This phone service will provide unlimited call access and many other additional features.

We will continue to award our existing customers for referrals by expanding and improving our referral program.  Our online referral program will allow our customers to send emails to their friends and neighbors from the referral tracking application that will be upgraded in our customer portal.

We plan on adding additional communities to our service areas in 2012.  They include:

Richland County communities of:

Rockbridge

Hub City

Gotham

Lone Rock

Additional communities and areas may be added as 2012 unfolds, depending upon demand and financial considerations.  As always we ask that if you have interest in our services and would like to help improve the chance of providing your community, village, or township to our service area that you fill our online signup process.  This allows us to track the areas that we are unable to service currently and to determine prospective numbers for our ROI calculations as we determine what areas should be built out next.

WIConnect Wireless 2011 Year in Review

A few years back I began to take a few minutes every year to review the accomplishments that we have made and the goals and tasks for the upcoming year.   This year has had many accomplishments and many struggles as most small business startups do.

The addition of new customers was our main goal for 2011.   We have surpassed 500 customers and are close to 60 access points in our ever expanding service area.   With many of the new access point this year filling in the gaps in service coverage areas we have taken our services to the last mile for many of our customers.   Several of our service areas provide high speed internet service where the cellular wireless service providers cannot!  We continue to strive to get that quality last mile wireless service into rural areas.   The addition of Leland, Blackhawk and Bear Valley were some of our new service area additions for 2011.

We worked on increasing our bandwidth and backbone infrastructure this year to be able to meet the demand of our additional network users.  We are continuing to increase our network capacity and bandwidth to keep up with the demand.    We have also added a complete network monitoring solution that allows us to track service availability for all of our customers.  This allows us to provide more timely response when an issue arises.  This monitoring solution has helped us during many of the storms and power outages that 2011 brought our way.  We ask that our customers leave their equipment powered on all of the time in order to allow us to track service to your home.

During 2011 we made a strong commitment to make sure we were keeping our organization as green as possible.   We developed and implemented the customer portal which allows you to review your account balances, invoices and credits, and pay online with your credit card any outstanding balances if you choose that option.  This has allowed us to continue to grow without adding additional resources for the billing and accounting functions.   We will continue to improve and expand our customer portal over the next year. We hope to have an automated service upgrade option available in the first quarter of 2012.

We have worked hard at implementing our long awaited phone service.   We are rolling out our residential phone services for our wireless network customers as of the January 1, 2012 and we look forward to being able to provide a needed service while being able to save you money.

I know that the upcoming year is going to provide us with some of the greatest challenges that we have yet to face in business, but I look forward to continuing to provide a great service for our loyal and deserving customers.   Our service and support will be the cornerstone of our success and we hope to continue with that success in 2012.

Happy Surfing!

Dave

WIConnect Wireless was recently the recipient of a phishing scam.  You can read more about phishing here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phishing.

Basically, someone sent an unauthorized message to our customers requesting that they send their email address and password back in an email message for account verification.  They carefully crafted the email so that when you hit reply, they would receive the information, even though it looked like it was from us.

We request that you change your email password at the first available opportunity.  You may do so by clicking on the WebMail link under the Customer's menu at the top of any page on our website.  Log in with your current credentials, and then click on Options > MDaemon Settings > My Account.  If you have trouble, we can assist you over the phone from the office during normal business hours.

Please remember, no one from WICW will EVER ask you for your account password or billing information in an email message.

If this message below looks familiar, and you replied to it, your account has most certainly been compromised.

Dear wicw.net email users,
 
   This message is from your webmail internet service provider and
 maintenance of your email account for all users. We are improving our
 email database due to spam activities identified by our Web Server.
 
 
 You are required to verify your email account by confirming your
 identification. This will help us secure your account and neutralize all
 spam activities identified.
 
 
 To confirm your identity, Do provide us with the following information as
 requested below:

 
 * Name: (...........) (Required)
 * Password: (...........) (Required)
 * Confirm Password: (...........) (Required)
 
 * * Important
 Please provide this information accurately for safety reasons to avoid
 inaccessibility of your account.

Remember, when in doubt, call our office!

We are performing a major network upgrade this week, so if there are problems such as the inability to log into your online account, or access portions of the website, please try again later.  We are trying to minimize downtime, so please be patient with us as we work.

 

(Update: Tuesday, May 17th 8:00PM)

The WICW online accounting/payment website is offline.  It should be online by 9:00PM.  Thanks for your patience.

 

(Update: Tuesday, May 17th 9:00PM)

Didn't quite hit our target.  The disk clone process is at 98%.  We should be up in a little bit.

 

(Update: Tuesday, May 17th 9:10PM)

Accounting/payment server upgrade complete.  Please let us know if you have any issues.

 

(Update: Thursday, May 19th 1:00AM)

DNS server offline.  This will affect all web-services including mail and all our websites.

 

(Update: Thursday, May 19th 2:00AM)

DNS Server back online.