Internet future described as bright at LV conference

Kevin Ferguson

Wednesday, May 9, 2001 | 11:02 a.m.

The days when you can flip off your home coffee maker while sitting in your office across town using your computer's Internet web browser are coming -- just maybe a little later than sooner due to the slowdown in the technology industry.

The move to a purely digital world will occur in the not too distant future, Intel Corp. Chief Executive Craig Barrett said Tuesday during a keynote speech at the Networld + Interop conference in Las Vegas.

Technology and telecommunications managers for Nevada companies exhibiting at the trade show agreed.

The heart of this movement, Barrett said, will be the Internet, serving as the backbone of a seamless linkage of the computing and telecommunications industries.

"The (tech) industry will get better, if not tomorrow, the next day. The reason is, we have a digital world ahead of us," said Barrett, whose company is a leader in computer chip development and manufacturing.

Despite the news of numerous bankruptcies in the two industries, Barrett said there have been numerous positive signs that the Internet is still thriving.

"Every two minutes, 400 new users join the Internet; 1,400 new auctions are listed on eBay every two minutes; 1,500 cell phones are sold every two minutes; and Amazon.com sells $11,000 worth of goods every two minutes," he said.

The problem, he said, is that voice, data and wireless networks today are inefficient by themselves.

"But they must grow into a seamless network," Barrett said. "Right now, they are tied together by gateways and servers. (The industry) needs to come up with open standards of merging them (together)."

Edmund Taylor, product manager for Reno-based Sharegate Inc., which was exhibiting at the trade show, said there is a lot of momentum behind such open standards.

He noted his company, which is developing a product aimed at linking home appliances with computers and TVs through a central device, has joined tech and telecom giants SBC Communications, Sun Microsystems and IBM Corp., among others, in lobbying for the Open Services Gateway Initiative.

More than 70 companies have joined the non-profit group since it was formed in March 1999. It aims to establish worldwide open standards that would be so basic that independent software developers could write computer programs and make them available to consumers.

"Once you have open standards, you start to increase innovation and bring customers more value," Intel's Barrett said.

James Evans, a Las Vegas senior account executive of TelePacific Communications, said open standards would provide businesses with a lot of flexibility in hiring technicians or contracting with various companies.

He noted that if a company hired to provide telecommunication services suddenly went bankrupt, it would be less difficult to hire another firm to continue the service without needing to rewire the entire building.

TelePacific Communications, which exhibited at the trade show, is a three-year startup that provides T-1 networks that largely equip businesses with ultra-fast Internet connections as well as provide phone lines. The company is headquartered in Los Angeles and has 32 employees in its Las Vegas office.

Barrett, in his keynote, also spoke of the bankruptcies associated with companies that provided or tried to provide speedy Internet access through digital subscriber lines.

He said getting the service was not only difficult in various communities, but often unreliable. Many consumers have found it to be too expensive for their trouble.

In addition, some DSL providers have been raising their rates in order to balance the cost of improving their service. Barrett said that has led to a decline in consumer interest.

"The (DSL) providers are more interested in profit margins than expanding the capital outlay of the service, and so they are raising their rates," Barrett said.

J.D. Ott, Sprint regional implementation manager of DSL, said the company hasn't raised its rates in Las Vegas. Sprint offers four different DSL speeds, with the lowest, 512K (about 10 times faster than a dial-up modem), priced at $44 a month.

"Many of the companies that have had financial problems have been startups that over-extended themselves," Ott said. "The major telecommunications companies, such as the Baby Bells, are still doing thousands of installs around the country daily."

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