E-Town, USA

Entrepreneurs all over the country are taking matters into their own hands and transforming their communities into wired cities. Here's how you can compete from anywhere.

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Over and over again, we keep coming back to the same maxim: When it comes to growing a business, location matters. Traffic and shipping routes, the availability of skilled labor, tax rates, economic incentives, the presence of nearby universities -- they all play a significant role in determining whether your business thrives or dives. Now it's time to add a new ingredient. When you're thinking of moving, opening a new branch, expanding markets, or hiring telecommuters, ask yourself this: How wired is the place you're considering? Can you get high-speed access to the Internet? What will it cost you? How prepared is the workforce to toil in a digital world? Is the area up-to-date enough to lure friendly competitors and colleagues with whom you can share ideas, do deals, and attract employees and financing? (Or, hell, just get your network serviced?) What does it really mean to be connected, anyway?

A few months ago, Inc. Technology writers set out to answer those knotty questions. When we began, we thought we'd find the 10 or 20 most digital places in the country and that would be that.

But it didn't turn out that way. Sure, we can tell you where to find the largest number of domain-name registrations (McLean, Va.) and where the highest number of Web-connected households are (Austin). Practically anyone can name the hip dot-com havens -- the Washington, D.C., metro area; Seattle; Cambridge, Mass.; Portland, Oreg.; Atlanta; New York City's Silicon Alley -- and the 80-plus places that have adopted Silicon nicknames, like Silicon Sandbar (Cape Cod), Silicon Swamp (Indiantown and Perry, Fla.), and the 10 Silicon Prairies. Not to mention all the cities that have claimed they're the most "wired," like Louisville ("America's Most Wired City") and Stillwater, Okla. ("The Most Wired City in America").

But what we wanted to know went far beyond those sorts of lists. We wanted to find out not just where dot-coms will spring up next, but how you should think about location if you're not a dot-com. Where should you look if you're a savvy company that is adopting modern methods of communicating and transacting business with customers, workers, and suppliers?

What we discovered was twofold. First, broadband access -- the collective term for rapid connections to the Net by T1, DSL, cable, and the like -- is far from ubiquitous, despite the hype. DSL and cable-modem services are available in a meager 5% of towns that have populations of 10,000 or less. Second, all over the country, diverse groups of people are taking matters into their own hands to turn their communities into wired neighborhoods, connected cities, and even digital states. And in the process they are transforming their businesses and improving both the economy and the civic life of their areas.

Why should you care? Because regardless of how low-tech your company might be now, the ability to do business over the Web -- and very soon with wireless devices -- will radically change your business and your industry. Not grabbing every bit of high-tech communication you can get is fast becoming a competitive disadvantage.

Consider, for a moment, two businesses in two very different parts of the country. The first is run by Darryl Lyons, a third-generation rancher and the proprietor of Lyons Farms, in Okmulgee, Okla. Last year Lyons started raising and selling registered Angus cattle. (If you like filet mignon and want to know the name of the bull that sired your $49 steak, this is the place to go.) Lyons sold about $140,000 worth of cattle and meat to buyers within a 100-mile radius of his ranch in 1999. But with the help of the Web, he expects to sell his animals and beef to buyers in Brazil, Canada, and other parts of the world. He estimates that revenues will climb to $600,000 this year and to $1.5 million in 2001.

But he's got one little problem to solve before he can get his Web site -- www.allangus.com -- online. His phone service goes out when it rains, when there's a "hard snow," and, he says, "when something critical is happening." (As if to prove his point, his phone service quit during our interview; he had to call back from a pay phone.) Lyons says that maybe a dozen times a year, the phone goes down for more than a day. Each day it's down, he loses $3,000 to $4,000 in sales. "When an individual wants to buy a bull for breeding purposes," says Lyons, "he wants it now." No phone? No bull.

When we spoke, Lyons was considering ditching his ISDN plans and going for a more expensive and faster T1 line, which theoretically would be easier to install. And he was looking at wireless-phone systems, which he hoped might be more reliable than his weather-challenged local phone service is.

But OK, you say, that's a ranch in Oklahoma. They have tornadoes there. It's not a huge surprise that the digital world hasn't yet reached Okmulgee. Amazingly enough, however, it hasn't always reached the most urban places in the nation -- like New York City, where economic-development agencies and private developers are trying to promote lucrative spin-offs of Silicon Alley.

Flanked on two sides by the massive Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges is a 20-square-block development dubbed with the unfortunate acronym DUMBO (for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass). Real estate developer David Walentas bought nearly every building in this old manufacturing neighborhood 20 years ago. Now, with the help of the New York City Economic Development Corp. and the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce, his company, Two Trees Management, is rehabbing its 100-year-old buildings and marketing them to start-up dot-coms and new-media companies.

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