Chiropractor bypasses U S West

By Nancy Plevin

The New Mexican

While lawmakers and others bemoan New Mexico’s failure to join the high-tech, high-speed information age because U S West won't build the needed infrastructure, a Grants chiropractor has been quietly circumventing the phone giant and bringing tiny, rural communities online.

"We did it anyway," Louis Utarro says. Utarro did it through a Livermore, Calif., company called Intellicom that provides access to the Internet over a satellite dish.

He found the outfit by surfing the Web, and after spending only $6,000 for equipment, installation and training, he was up and running in 30 days.

Utarro, under the name Cibola Internet Services, now serves almost 1,000 households in the town of 10,000 and has become a distributor of the technology in about 15 other rural New Mexico communities.

Some of those customers have become local Internet providers, and others mostly schools and companies-use it for themselves. The communities include Ranton, Springer, Cimarron, Jemez Springs, Crownpoint, Farmington, Grants, Questa, Taos and Penasco. "Within the next year we hope to more than double that number," Utarro said.

Utarro charges his Grants customers only $24.95 a month for unlimited time on the Internet, with no long-distance phone charges.

By midsummer he plans to offer wireless, super-high speed connections fro about $50 a month.

Once that happens, Utarro won’t even have to use local phone lines to receive incoming calls from customers, who will then have permanent Internet connections. Households only will need a rooftop antenna and a radio modem the size of two cigarette packs.

"Then we can totally bypass U S West," Utarro said.

Pretty good for an old chiropractor, Utarro suggests.

After six months of being told by U S West that they had right-of-way and "funding" problems and couldn’t provide him with traditional T-1 lines to operate his business, Utarro thought "there's got to be another way to do this."

"My training is not in computers and technology, so I didn't have a bias that tis is the way things have always been done," he said.