Echo IT Consulting, LLC was founded in 2010 in Western Colorado to serve rural Colorado’s IT, networking, and broadband needs. As the owner and principal consultant, I founded ECHO IT with the vision of providing enterprise level IT and broadband services to historically underserved rural Southwest Colorado. A Colorado native, I went to high school in rural Western Colorado, graduated from CSU with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering in 1997, and started my career with Boeing in the Denver area. I worked in networking, general IT, and broadband services for enterprise level government (DOD) and private entities around the world, and eventually brought these skills back to Colorado to apply here. I (along with the rest of Echo IT) have a positive reputation in broadband consulting among regional organizations like Region 9, Region 10, and state level agencies (CBO, DOLA) for my extensive technical broadband expertise and ability to work well with all typical stakeholders in broadband development.

Our track record with gap analysis, finding and successfully applying for grant funding to fill these gaps, and ability to work with local providers, government officials, and others is well established.

Echo IT Consulting began in Pagosa Springs, Colorado in October 2010 and currently provides broadband consultation services and information technology support and planning services to many public sector and private clients, predominately in the four corners region of southwestern Colorado and northern New Mexico.

Echo was founded by Eric C. Hittle, when he returned to Colorado after spending the 1st portion of his IT career managing networks, data centers, telecommunications, and enterprise services for large and medium sized federal government contractors in a diverse set of locations, including Denver, Maryland, England, and Australia.  He brought this large enterprise experience and skillset back to Colorado with him and established an IT services company to bring enterprise-grade support to a part of rural Colorado where high-level professional services was not the standard.

As Echo grew, it became almost immediately evident, as much there was a demand for local support for servers and storage area networks, that area businesses and institutions also lacked accessibility to adequate and reliable broadband.  This was the inception of Eric and ECHO IT’s involvement in rural Colorado broadband development, and has helped us form our end-user focused, practical foundation broadband development philosophy.

Technical Director (since 2019) Directs all broadband planning, grant application, and coordination for Archuleta County. Acts as liaison between public-sector entities and area ISPs and manages corporately owned networking assets.

Community broadband analysis, including analysis of existing infrastructure, CNL placement, identification of served/underserved areas and ways to best provide coverage of underserved areas based on topography, existing infrastructure, provider availability and cost effectiveness, while taking into account community needs for redundancy and future planning.

Middle-mile solutions have been negotiated with a variety of partners, via IRU, in-kind swap of fiber, pole attachment of new fiber build, grant/Match funded buried sections, etc.  Entities have included county governments (Archuleta, La Plata, San Juan, Dolores, Montezuma), regional and local economic development agencies and council of governments (Pagosa Springs CDC, Region 9, Region 10, SWCCOG, SLVCOG, etc.), public utility providers (Black Hills Energy, La Plata Electric Association, Tri-State, Empire Electric), and state-level agencies (CDOT, for fiber IRU and ROW; DOLA, for funding; CBO, for support).

Eric Hittle has worked with county and tribal officials, public utilities, state-level organizations to secure both categories of middle-mile networks for communities he’s been tasked with improving.  For long-haul middle-mile, he’s worked with CDOT for several years to secure access to the fiber being built over Wolf Creek Pass for use by Archuleta County and the entire Four Corners region.  Along with Corey Bryndal, of Region 10, he also worked with DOLA, La Plata and Archuleta Counties, the Southern Ute Tribe, and La Plata Electric Association (LPEA) to reach a 4-way partnership to build aerial middle mile on LPEA poles and connect to the middle-mile fiber build of the Southern Ute tribe, providing a connection from Pagosa Springs to Durango, where no non-proprietary fiber-optic line exists.

Last-mile solutions have been provided by Echo IT themselves, via both fiber and fixed wireless solutions and facilities owned by Echo IT, as well as working with larger established providers to find the best solutions for an acceptable price for their clients.  This includes private last-mile providers such as: Visionary communications, FastTrack Communications, Ting, Zitomedia, Starlink, and Lumen.