By Rachel Konrad
The Associated Press

SAN JOSE, Calif. - New figures on offshore outsourcing suggest that American companies are sending even more white-collar jobs to low-wage countries such as India, China and Russia than researchers originally estimated.

Roughly 830,000 U.S. service-sector jobs - ranging from telemarketers and accountants to software engineers and chief technology officers - will move abroad by the end of 2005, according to a report released Monday by Forrester Research Inc.

The Cambridge, Mass.-based firm projected in 2002 that 588,000 jobs would move overseas by the end of next year.

Forrester also increased its long-term job loss prediction, estimating that 3.4 million jobs will leave the United States by 2015. The company originally predicted long-term loss of 3.3 million positions - a figure that members of Congress and labor activists said was cause for alarm.

Forrester analysts boosted their short-term job loss expectations by 40 percent based on updated job data based provided by the U.S. Department of Labor.

Lead researcher John C. McCarthy said widespread publicity over the cost savings associated with offshoring - increasingly a topic of partisan debate in the presidential campaign - might have hastened the trend. The average computer programmer in India earns roughly $10 an hour, compared to more than $60 an hour for the average American.

"People were reading about offshoring at their breakfast table," McCarthy said in a phone interview. "That made a lot of (chief information officers) who were unaware of the cost savings consider moving in that direction."