Virginia

With traffic choking the major metropolitan areas of the country, I think that some smaller cities like Roanoke, Virginia and Scranton, Pennsylvania are poised for growth, if they can adequately address a range of quality of life issues. These smaller cities may have a rush hour, but it usually measured in minutes, not hours, and because they are located outside major urban corridors, it is possible to have a nice house in the woods a few miles from town and still drive to work in fifteen or twenty minutes.

Verizon wants to be deregulated in Virginia for phone service. The company asserts that there is ample competition and that the company should no longer be forced to charge set prices for certain services.

Henrico County, Virginia, has garnered national attention for its program of giving laptops to kids once they reach sixth grade. But if the school system is not prepared to truly transform the teaching and learning process, the results may not be what we expect. In this article, at least one mother made her daughter give the laptop back because it had become a time waster for the girl and her grades had dropped.

A Virginia Tech chemist (hat tip to the Roanoke Times)has developed a molecule that enables an artificial photosynthesis process that can be used to split water. In doing so, you end up with hydrogen that can be used to power an automobile. Sunlight is used to provide energy for the process. It is still in an experimental stage, but points the way for simply being able to fuel your car from the garden hose.

Roanoke is a city near Blacksburg, and the city's demographics are skewed, like many rural towns and cities, toward older people. The City recently decided to stop wringing its hands about the paucity of young people and actually do something. First they hired someone whose primary job responsibility is to solve the problem, and then gave him free rein.

Back in 2000, I began promoting the idea that one way communities should finance broadband was by selling shares in a stock ownership corporation. In this way, the entire community could participate in the ownership of a Knowledge Economy business. A stock ownership approach to community broadband has several advantages.

I've added a new category called the "Agriculture Economy" to the Technology News section. For several years, I have encouraged rural regions to look closely at new models of agriculture that are entrepreneur-focused, rather than relying on traditional agriculture models where the farmer is basically just the factory floor--food products are "produced" and then put on trucks, hauled away, and sold by others, who also make most of the profit.

The Region 2000 Technology Council, which serves Lynchburg, Virginia and the surrounding area, is really beginning to make a difference. A year ago, they found that too many people in the area still did not understand the value of broadband, in part because they had never had a chance to try it.

Loudoun County, which is located in northern Virginia, has created what may be a first--the county now has a paid position called Manager of Broadband Services. Funded from telecom use fees paid to the county, the new employee, Scott Bashore, will have the responsibility to advise the county on broadband strategies, set a vision for the county on the future use of technology, and will work closely with businesses to ensure the county has the right broadband infrastructure in place to support economic development.

Here is an excerpt from a brochure about a project in Southside Virginia, a rural area that has traditionally relied on tobacco as a primary engine of its economy. Furniture and textile manufacturing were also mainstays for jobs and development, but over the past twenty years, all three have declined sharply.

The low cost of living, combined with the proximity to Greensboro and the North Carolina Research Triangle, may make Southside one of the best places to work in America, once this infrastructure is in place.

Also included as a service will be MSAPs in some locations, which create very high performance community intranets that support next generation multimedia services. The MSAP concept was pioneered by me while I was Director of the Blacksburg Electronic Village. Blacksburg has had an MSAP in operation since 1999, and Danville, Virginia also has an MSAP.

Note the emphasis on leasing capacity to "all interested providers," which includes incumbents, who, if they are smart, will realize they can lower their costs by leasing instead of overbuilding.

The Mid-Atlantic Broadband Cooperative (MBC), a non-profit cooperative with funding from the Economic Development Authority (EDA) and the Virginia Tobacco Commission (VTC), has contracted to deploy an advanced open-access wholesale broadband network in Southside Virginia. The RBI is a 700-mile fiber-optic network with 48 strands of dedicated fiber backbone, Synchronous Optical Network (SONET) architecture, dual rings with 13 OC-192 backbone sites and 65 satellite locations providing low speed & high speed interconnect facilities (OC-3, OC-12, OC-48, STS, VT). In addition to the turn-key implementation of the RBI, MBC has invested in building a new state of the art Network Operations Control Center (NOCC) in South Boston, Virginia.

The RBI network will connect four cities, 20 counties and 56 industrial parks providing access to nearly 700,000 citizens and more than 19,000 businesses throughout Southside Virginia. The goal of this project is to promote economic development opportunities for the region, attracting technologybased business and industry. Network construction begins in January 2005 and will be turned-up in phases. MBC plans to have the entire network fully operational by December 2006. MBC will be selling/leasing fiber and services on a wholesale basis to all interested providers.

About this time last year, Virginia Tech, right here in rural Appalachia, made world news with a dirt cheap supercomputer that ranked number 3 in the world in terms of speed and processing power.

The university did some thinking out of the box and discarded the conventional approach to building supercomputers (typically using a lot of custom hardware). Instead they bought 1100 off the shelf Macintoshes, wired them together with more off the shelf hardware, and wrote a small amount of software to turn the Macs into a monster supercomputer.

A Ziff-Davis news article chronicles a series of new broadband projects and applications using broadband, and calls broadband a "necessity."