Outsourced Within
At night, Rachel Evans nestles under a canvas teepee in the Methow Valley, a spot so pastoral she can hear her Norwegian fjord horse gently breathing.By day, she directs research and development at a thriving dot-com.
That a 25-year-old sleeps in a teepee and works for a high-tech company is not surprising. What’s groundbreaking, literally, is the location of her employer, HomeMovie.com, just up the road in the Western-theme town of Winthrop, population 351.
Though well-known for its human-powered recreation (hiking, mountain biking, cross-country skiing), the glacial valley around this town is cut off from the rest of the state by the jagged geography of mountains and hardscrabble steppe. When winter closes the North Cascades Highway, this is beyond the end of the road.
It’s more than three hours by car to the nearest freeway exit, two hours to movie theaters and shopping malls. It’s a place where, as late as 2001, folks in certain canyons were struggling to get phone service. Four hours from Seattle, a century-wide gap in telecommunications.
No more. These days, fiber-optic cables run like a river down the valley. Microwave towers beam data from peak to peak.
Jokingly, I ask Evans if she can get streaming video in her teepee.
Seriously, she replies, “Of course! . . . Six megabits per second.”
The Methow Valley, along with the rest of rural Washington, is now wired. The same technology that makes it possible to outsource to India and the Philippines is changing the labor landscape closer to home. Thanks to broadband, specks on the map now have the potential to be cyber kingdoms and server farms, data portals and telecommuting perches.
Jason Haley on August 17th, 2006 6:21 pm
Interesting Finds: August 17, 2006…
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