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Sunday, September 19, 1999
Internet changing how we communicate, do business
By Aaron Baca
Journal Staff Writer
Kevin Rosenberg is an emergency room doctor in Farmington who happens to own a crystal ball of sorts.
Rosenberg, when he's not working as an emergency room doctor, runs Cyber Station, one of northwest New Mexico's largest Internet providers.
Calling the Internet perhaps one of the most important communication tools created, he believes it will rapidly change nearly every aspect of the way we do business and communicate in the next few years.
"The computer and the Internet have made a significant difference in the way we communicate with each other," Rosenberg says. "In fact, the only way I can describe it is to say that calling it significant is a big understatement."
He's not alone.
Business communication in New Mexico has for decades meant the telephone. In the late 1980s, it came to mean the telephone and the fax machine.
Now, each day tens of thousands of new users hook up to the Internet and begin firing off e-mail.
It is changing the world, says Mariane Granoff, an independent telecommunications and Internet consultant in Albuquerque.
"We are dependent on it now," she says. "Look at how much has changed in the last few years. It used to be no one was online. Now it seems like everyone is. Businesses certainly are.
"Our reliance on the Internet has grown much more in the past few years than our reliance on the telephone did when it was developing," Granoff says.
"The computer used to be something that was behind the scenes," Rosenberg says. "If people used them at home, it was to do their checking account or for record keeping.
"Now people are buying it just to communicate. They want on the Internet."
And that includes all its trappings: the World Wide Web, video conferencing, voice transmission and, of course, e-mail.
"We see long-distance voice calls and video teleconferencing happening on the Internet," she says. "Basically, whatever we do now in business communications will be put onto the Internet."
Those, of course, are national trends and predictions. New Mexico, despite its growing prowess in technology and tech-based firms, remains something of a laggard in Internet development.
U S West, the state's primary telephone company, so far has not invested heavily in Internet-related technology in New Mexico.
"U S West has not kept up with the demand very well," Granoff says. "They simply haven't seen New Mexico as a place for high-speed service."
U S West says it tried to introduce more affordable high speed services like Digital Subscriber Lines last year.
But New Mexico regulators, unlike regulators in U S West's other 13 territories, demanded that the company give up pricing data that it considers proprietary.
Until the regulatory climate changes here, U S West says it has no plans to offer DSL.
Rosenberg says what high speed services are available are expensive for individual users and for businesses.
"If we (at Cyber Station) buy a line, we're charged by the mile for that line," he says. "Naturally, we have to pass that off to the consumer."
Granoff says New Mexico's rural towns are hard to serve. Getting more lines to those communities is tough, she says, because of right-of-way issues involving private and public lands.
Despite its limited infrastructure, however, New Mexico's use of the Internet as a communication device is well-spread, Granoff says.
"The state is using it; businesses are using it instead of catalogs," she says. "The metropolitan areas are well-covered. The state will catch up. It's heading that way."
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