2004 Teleworking Advances

I had lunch today with an old friend who manages institutional real estate portfolios. He was talking about fundamental changes not only in development trends, but in holding patterns and asset types. He said that although the sector will always be strong, it's complexity and ever changing dynamics always makes the daily trip into the office interesting.

He asked what I thought. I said "Don't underestimate the spread of broadband. It'll drive a whole lot more than faster music downloads." He gave me a bit of a blank look and we promptly switched topics to this week's Republican Convention. Did I offend him, or did my answer just seem a little wacky and misplaced? I didn't think so, after all when the use of broadband expands, so to will the range of tasks that can be done on an anywhere/anytime basis, making the old office seem, well, old, as suggested in this article:

For most information-type jobs, the addition of broadband equips the home office equally as well as the employers' cubicles. "I can be sitting at home and it's like being in [the] office" was a typical comment in last year's report.

The really interesting changes will come when broadband becomes truly ubiquitous. Is it possible? Can the economics possibly make any sense? Well, according to this article, not only is it possible, but it's about to descend on Philadelphia like a blanket, and the math actually works!

The ambitious plan, now in the works, would involve placing hundreds, or maybe thousands of small transmitters around the city — probably atop lampposts. Each would be capable of communicating with the wireless networking cards that now come standard with many computers...Once complete, the network would deliver broadband Internet almost anywhere radio waves can travel — including poor neighborhoods where high-speed Internet access is now rare.

At the end of our lunch we tossed around the idea of taking in a basketball game in the fall, or sneaking away for one more round of golf before the summer ends. We shook hands and as he was leaving, he turned back to me and said "Broadband, eh? You got me thinkin' Gill."

Isn't the future is just totally cool?