Albuquerque Journal
Monday, December 28, 1998

TECH PIONEER
Louis Uttaro uses a satellite to bring the World Wide Web to small-town American

“If not for Lou, Id be driving the freeways to Albuquerque.”

 KAREN THOMAS-BATES, OF GRANTS

Service brings Internet to rural N.M.

Louis Uttaro uses a satellite to bring the World Wide Web to a grateful community

By Franchesca Stevens

For the Journal

GRANTS-Louis Uttaro is a hero of sorts to some customers and an example of how small-town America can keep pace with the latest technology.

As the owner of Cibola Internet Services, he provides Internet access via satellite.

He makes it possible for people like certified medical transcriptionist Karen Thomas-Bates of Grants to work out of their homes

Otherwise, she says, she’d face a daily, 150-mile round trip commute to Albuquerque to work in an office. Instead, she receives voice files at 5:30 each morning from doctors in Michigan and in Las Vegas, N.M., off the Internet and then transcribes them on her computer and sends them back. 

"If not for Lou, I'd be driving the freeways to Albuquerque," Thomas-Bates says. "And frankly, I’m just not willing to do that."

At St. Teresa Catholic School, also in Grants, students sing praises of Uttaro’s service by praying the five mysteries of the rosary with computer-generated hymns playing in the background.

St. Teresa’s Principal, Jerry Garcia, says the school’s Internet access “provides for us what we need.” He says kids go to the school library to research class projects and use the Internet to keep up with current events.

Thomas-Bates and Garcia pay about $25 a month the going rate to most Internet service subscribers. However, Uttaro has figured out a way to provide his service more cheaply than those relying on traditional -terrestrial" lines supplied by a local phone company.

The 41-year-old uses GE Americom’s GE-3 satellite to offer Internet access to rural areas that don’t have the infrastructure to support the required high-powered phone lines.

As a former U S West Internet service provider, he says he invested $3,000 to $4,000 to make the switch to Tellicom, which leases satellite access through its office in Fremont, Calif.

Uttaro he tried going with U S West but without luck. He said he contacted the phone company in the fall of 1997 to request additional lines for his expanding business, and U S West told him it could help but couldn’t deliver.

He says six months later, U S West admitted it couldn’t provide more powerful fiber optic lines until it got clearance to cross Indian land.

U S West has been trying to put a fiber optic system from Albuquerque to Grants and also from Farmington to Albuquerque. Both routes have run into problems with acquiring rights of way.

U S West recently said it hopes to have a cable in place to Grants as early as June 1999. "So here I was selling customers access to the Internet and I didn’t really have the bandwidth (capacity to sell them, "Uttaro says. I was selling a product I really didn’t have at the time." Then, he says, he discovered an answer to his problem. He’d pay Tellicom to use its satellite. By the following April, he’d installed a 6-foot-wide satellite dish on the roof of his office and converted all his customers’ service to satellite usage.

"I was up and running in less than two days. Total downtime for the system was less than three hours," Uttaro says.

Uttaro, a licensed chiropractor, has been ministering to the community’s health needs since October 1984.

He's originally from Spencerport, N.Y., near Rochester, and says he decided to make the career change about tow years ago while recuperating from a broken shoulder.

That's when he says he started asking himself, "What if I don’t heal properly and can’t be a chiropractor?"

After five days of intensive research about cyberspace, he says he came to three “serious” conclusions: One, the Internet's not going to go away.

Two, the Internet’s only going to get larger.

And three, someday everybody’s going to be using it for something.

Uttaro has no regrets about phasing out of his chiropractic practice ­ other than that he’ll miss his patients. He says being an Internet service provider is “fascinating” because it allows him to “bring the world” to his subscribers.

Here's a good example," he says. “At one time, to be a stock broker with any kind of magnitude, you had to be in a large metropolitan area. But what about the guy that doesn’t have the resources to invest in a business there? He can still play the game and he can play it from his home anywhere that he can get onto the Internet."

So, if you choose to live the lifestyle of rural America and get away from the hustle and bustle of the large city buy you still want to partake in those sorts of things, you can do it if you have Internet access. It's truly the great equalizer, I think

Articles about Uttaro’s switch to satellite have recently appeared in the New York Times and ZDNet News online. He says that’s generated even more interest in his brand of service making him Tellicom’s New Mexico representative.

He hopes to coordinate the installation of about 10 additional Tellicom sites in rural New Mexico by early next year. He’s also a partner in Sandia Internet Services in Albuquerque, co-owned by Salvador Chavez.

Sandia Internet uses traditional phone lines to service its customers.

FOCUS ON:

Cibola Internet Services

Ownership:

Louis Uttaro and his wife, Debra

Products/Services:

Internet service provider using satellite technology in Grants area

Year Founded:

1995

# Of Locations:

One office in Grants, but setting up new service in Springer. Also looking at several other small cities around the state for service in 1999.

Annual Sales:

Not disclosed

# of Employees:

3

Payroll Not Including Benefits:

Not disclosed

Business Tip:

"Be persistent with your vision and keep it ever expanding." Louis Uttaro