Work from home opportunities continue to increase

DirecTV recently announced it was bringing more jobs to southwest Virginia, but these are not traditional jobs. Instead, these are work from home jobs. The company is establishing a virtual call center. Congressman Rick Boucher made a sweep through the region last month to announce the new job opportunities, which amount to 100 new jobs. DirecTV already employs more than 1100 home-based workers, and other major firms like Apple have been making heavy use of home-based workers for several years.

What does this mean for economic development? Several things jump out:

• Neighborhoods and rural roads are now business districts.
• These new business districts need affordable, business class broadband services, including not just Internet access but VoIP telephone service and the ability to support high performance VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) for access to corporate data centers.
• Symmetric bandwidth is essential for some kinds of work from home opportunities, and most existing cable and DSL residential services don't support symmetric bandwidth.
• Training and re-training the local workforce to qualify for these jobs should now be part of economic development activities.