Small Town, Big Connections

A look at how community networking gives rural businesses a chance to play in the big leagues.

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Community networking gives rural businesses a chance to play in the big leagues

A long ribbon of road winds across the high desert of northern New Mexico, vanishing into the gold and green backdrop of the snowcapped Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The air is tangy with the sweet smell of burning piÒon wafting up from the chimneys of the pink and brown adobe homes that, like the sagebrush, dot the landscape. Native American families doing their marketing and chores, stopping occasionally to chat, crisscross an ancient dirt plaza surrounded by multistory straw-and-mud buildings. This is the 1,000-year-old Taos Pueblo, one of the oldest continuously inhabited communities in North America.

A few miles down the road is a modest adobe home. The tan house with the small yard and thick crop of greenery in front is typical Taos. But inside, Kathie Priebe is tapping away on one of her three 486 computers, the reds, blues, greens, and yellows emanating from the monitors flickering across the white walls. Priebe is swapping information at 14,400 bits per second as she downloads files from a company in Switzerland.

These are the two faces of Taos, N. Mex. At one end of town, ancient traditions still center people in a changeless world. But across the literal and meta-phoric plaza, businesses are linking to a shifting, restless global marketplace via high-speed telecommunications. Since January, nearly 100 businesses in Taos have signed on to the World Wide Web.

What is happening in Taos is part of a national movement. Small remote communities are attempting to bridge their isolation by taking their businesses and even their local governments on-line. "Community networking," as the phenomenon is known, brings the Internet to people in far-flung outposts. Rural businesses have seized the opportunity to play in the big leagues, with entrepreneurs of every stripe now hawking their wares in cyberspace. Taos, along with other small communities like Telluride and Steamboat Springs, Colo., has become a model for the ways that rural communities can use the Internet.

So far the results have been uneven. Getting on-line -- and profiting from the experience -- can be a challenge for people who live in large urban areas bursting with telecommunications expertise and resources; doing the same in the outback is all the more difficult. Yet the businesspeople in Taos who are venturing onto the Internet have high hopes. If they can make the experiment work, thousands of other tiny rural communities are likely to follow.

Kathie Priebe had spent a dozen years living and working in Silicon Valley when she decided it was time for a change. In 1994 Priebe started Intelli-Data, an information service that does everything from electronic news clipping to custom research. She hung out her shingle in San Jose, Calif., but quickly realized that there was little reason to stay in the city. "Frankly, no one showed up at my office," Priebe says. "Customers never came in; they just called on the phone."

So Priebe began thinking about relocating. She had vacationed in Taos and liked both the physical beauty of the place and its countercultural and multicultural communities. (Hispanics make up almost two-thirds of the town's population; Anglos account for a quarter of the residents; most of the rest trace their roots to the indigenous Pueblo population.) "I specifically wanted a rural environment," says the urban refugee. But she couldn't afford to be too rural; Priebe needed local access to the Internet in order to do business.

"The fact that there were basic telecommunications capabilities was very important to me," Priebe says. She opened an account with the local nonprofit Internet service provider (ISP), La Plaza Telecommunity Foundation Inc., tried it from California to make sure it worked, and moved to Taos in September 1995.

Sitting in her living room, wind chimes tingling softly outside her window, the sweat-suited Priebe confirms that her move has brought her both personal contentment and professional success. By the end of 1995, Intelli-Data was grossing around $100,000 a year and was making a profit.

But despite her premove research, Priebe's relocation was not as problem-free as she had hoped it would be. When she arrived in Taos, she discovered that La Plaza's telecommunications capabilities were not up to the demands of her work. The La Plaza network seemed to corrupt the large-volume data transfers she made daily. As a result she had to dial into an ISP in Albuquerque, a long-distance call away. Her monthly phone bill soared to nearly $800 a month, up from the $250 or so she had been paying in California. Rural living was nice, she says, but "the long-distance charges were killing me."

Fortunately for Priebe, La Plaza's success had spawned imitators. TaosWebb, a local commercial ISP, went on-line last spring and later became the design arm of another local ISP, TaosNet, which went on-line in early February of this year. Priebe volunteered to be a tester for TaosNet to be sure that it would work with her system. Now she connects locally and without glitches to the Internet on TaosNet -- and saves herself about $200 a month.

The key to succeeding in a rural environment, reflects Priebe, is "using your big-city skills -- but not a big-city attitude -- to leverage your environment. But there's got to be some kind of baseline infrastructure. You have to have phone services and someone who can fix your computer."

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