The Commonwealth is Flat   Northern Virginia has more work than it can handle, and it makes sense to "outsource" jobs to downstate communities. But someone has to build the broadband connections first.   As New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has famously observed, the world is flat. A new generation of collaboration technology allows companies to effectively disburse their employees across the globe. While politicians and commentators fear the loss of work to India, China, Korea or Malaysia, the same technology also offers the potential to spur economic development by redistributing jobs from growth-choked Northern Virginia to downstate communities hungry for jobs.   "Outsourcing" jobs from Northern Virginia to locations downstate would help everyone. Employers would save money by hiring Virginians in communities where wages are relatively low. Conversely, residents of economically depressed regions could find higher quality work. Meanwhile, a slowing of Northern Virginia job growth would ease the painful development pressure on some of the fastest-growing localities in the country.   However, the geographic redistribution of jobs through collaborative technology requires a vital ingredient that is not always in place: a broadband connection for both employer and employee. And those broadband connections require broadband networks.   Networks are expensive and take quite a while to build. In most states, the broadband network is provided by the telephone company, the cable TV company, a satellite company or some combination thereof.  In rare instances, the network is owned by municipal governments. Many factors determine where any network provider will start building out their broadband network: the existence of rights of way, existing facilities, etc. Ultimately, the decisive factor is expected profitability. All other things being equal, densely populated areas are more profitable because providers can reach more potential customers for the same investment.   That economic reality confers an immense economic advantage to locations in densely populated portions of large metropolitan areas. But it worries people who regard broadband connections as critical to modern life as electricity, telephone service or roads. Many believe that broadband connections should be provided to everybody regardless of the profitability of any individual connection. This concept of universal service, which originated with basic telephone service years ago, represents one possible approach to bringing broadband to rural areas.  However, regardless of approach, widespread broadband access is a basic prerequisite for Northern Virginia businesses to tap downstate labor markets.     Virginia has pursued a number of broadband-building initiatives, but it was only a month ago, June 13, 2007, that Gov. Timothy M. Kaine elevated broadband to a gubernatorial priority. Kaine announced the formation of a Broadband Roundtable to study the issue, and appointed former cell phone entrepreneur Gov. Mark W. Warner as its chairman. The group is scheduled to issue a final report in July 2008.   Compare that to Kentucky, which launched ConnectKentucky, a public-private partnership, to accelerate the deployment of broadband networks around the state. Kentucky's plan set the audacious goal of achieving 100 percent broadband penetration in the state by the end of 2007. In other words, Kentucky will have finished its state-wide broadband deployment about half-way through Virginia's year-long committee meeting.   Once again, Virginia's state government is a day late and a dollar short.   The technology of collaboration is sufficiently developed to allow for Virginia to move the work to the people rather than moving the people to the work. Some people will say that this is an old idea that just never worked. What these people are missing is a full appreciation of the exponential nature of technology improvement.   Most Bacon's Rebellion readers have heard of Moore's Law. First postulated by Gordon Moore, this "law" says that the price performance of a silicon chip will double every 18 to 24 months. Mr. Moore made this prediction in 1965 and has been pretty much right ever since.   It is difficult for most people to grasp the significance of an exponential curve. Let me give a well worn example in the form of a question. If you fold an 8 1/2" by 11" piece of paper in half 100 times, how thick will the folded piece of paper be? Up to your waist? To your head? To the ceiling? In fact, the paper's thickness will be 800 trillion times the distance from the Earth to the Sun (Gilovich, 1991).  The basic math is 0.1 mm (approximate thickness of a piece of paper) times 2 to the 100th power.    Early folds accomplish little. The first fold adds 0.1mm, the second fold adds 0.2mm, the third fold adds 0.4mm. By the third fold the paper is only .8mm thick. But the twentieth fold produces a piece of paper that is 1,048,576 mm thick (or 1,048 meters or somewhat more than half a mile). The 21st fold adds approximately another half mile to the stack. Then a mile. Then two miles. And so on.   Gordon Moore made his famous prediction 42 years ago. That's at least 21 generations of chip technology. In paper terms, each generation has gone from adding millimeters to adding miles. Mathematically speaking, these exponential curves are moving almost vertically. In technical terms, the last few generations of processing, storage, display technology and bandwidth have made effective collaboration a possibility. Improvements in chips make your computer faster. Improvements in storage make storing large objects almost free (witness YouTube), advances in display technology provide huge flat-screen TVs that normal homeowners can afford. Camera technology has gotten so good that cameras and video cameras are routinely embedded in cell phones. The next few generations of these same technologies will be adding the paper equivalent of miles to today's capabilities. Meanwhile, Gov. Kaine and former Gov. Warner form a committee to discuss the matter.   Defenders of Virginia's complacent attitude toward broadband might argue that the Old Dominion actually scores fairly well in rankings of broadband connectivity. The website Speed Matters declares that Virginia is the 11th best connected state from a broadband perspective. That's the good news.    Here's the bad news: A recent study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) ranks the United States as 15th among all countries in broadband penetration. So much for the country that invented the Internet. That news was so bad that the OECD received a strongly worded letter from the U.S. Department of State the day after OECD released the study. The State Department denounced the study methods. The author apparently didn't know what the broadband penetration rate in the United States really was, but he knew that he didn't like the OECD approach to measuring such things.    The news gets even worse -- at least it does if you believe the OECD. The OECD also measures the net increase in broadband penetration by country. Between the fourth quarter of 2005 and the same quarter of 2006 the United States finished #21 in net broadband increase per 100 people. Not only have we fallen off the leadership pace, we continue to fall even further behind.   Using data from the Speed Matters website,  you can see that some areas of Virginia have networks that are borderline for collaborative tasks. Some areas have no broadband connections at all.   (Map credit: Speed Matters, page 52 in the PDF file.)   Even the regions in Virginia with higher speeds, more than six megabits per second median download time, served by soda straws compared to the water pipes conveying data in the pace-setting countries: 61 megabits per second median download time in Japan, 45.6 mbps in Korea, 21.7 in Finland, 18.2 in Sweden, and 7.6 in Canada.   Where is the federal government in all this? On May 17, House Telecommunications Chairman Ed Markey submitted legislation entitled the Broadband Census Act of America 2007. This legislation is intended to count the number and location of America's broadband connections in a method deemed acceptable to Capitol Hill. Once complete, this census will allow politicians to make legislative decisions regarding the deployment of broadband in the United States.   A simple observation will suffice: Measuring broadband connectivity is not the same as adding to broadband connectivity. Bottom line: The U.S. is falling behind other developed countries, and Virginia is falling behind other states like Kentucky.   Moving jobs from Northern Virginia to downstate takes more than broadband networks. Someone has to organize the people who want to be employed (at a distance) and then sell their services to potential employers. That's just not happening in Virginia.   I have worked in one or another of those nameless, faceless office buildings in D.C. or Northern Virginia for the last 26 years. Since 2000 or so I have been deluged by people asking me why I don't outsource some of our work to them. These salesmen come from India, China, Texas, Israel, Oregon, the Czech Republic, the Slovak Republic, Russia, Belarus, Vietnam, Canada and countless other countries and U.S. states. They talk about the energy and the skill of their citizens, their lower wages (and therefore prices), their fluency in English, the stability of their currency relative to the dollar and they talk about their networks, always the networks. They tell me that they will create our PowerPoints, do our secretarial work, will test the systems we write, develop the systems we design, read our X-Rays if we're sick and answer our phones when we're away.   Through all those years and through all those meetings I have never been approached by a single person from any Virginia jurisdiction with any outsourcing offer. Not one person.   Many Virginians drive long distances to Tysons Corner to work. So, the people must have the skills needed in Tyson's. But why do they drive? Because the high paying jobs are in Tysons Corner but they want to live elsewhere.    Virginia's elected officials have missed a historic opportunity to hitch downstate economies to the dynamo in Tysons Corner. Should private industry lead the way? Yes. Should the local governments push the outsourcing of services as part of local economic development plans? Yes.   While individual employees might telecommute to Tysons there is no apparent organized effort to offload specific types of work from Tysons to other, lower cost areas of Virginia. By contrast, there are very organized and focused efforts to offload specific types of work from Tysons (and almost everywhere else) to Asia and Central Europe. These "offshoring" efforts are made with the full support (and sometimes the financial backing) of the foreign governments. While it is beyond the scope of this article to discuss the pros and cons of offshore work, shouldn't the municipalities in Virginia try this same approach?   Other states, like Kentucky, have demonstrated how to get the broadband built. The results? Here's what  ConnectKentucky says:   Since Governor Fletcher launched the Prescription for Innovation in late 2004, the availability and use of broadband across Kentucky has increased 50 percent. Approximately 518,000 previously un-served Kentucky households can now access broadband as private investment in telecommunications infrastructure has reached an unprecedented level. This represents an increase of more than 1.4 million additional Kentucky residents gaining broadband service since January 2004. Currently, 93 percent of Kentucky homes can access broadband, and ConnectKentucky expects every household to be capable of accessing high-speed Internet by the end of 2007. I can only hope that the government officials in Virginia take their cue from Kentucky and expedite the development of broadband networking within the state and the promotion of state-wide job distribution.   -- July 16, 2007