Down in tobacco road, cities like Ashville North Carolina and Roanoke Virginia are becoming hotbeds of remote work. Today's Roanoke Times has a long article where it highlights a series of local residents who all work remotely, showcasing why the people have chosen Roanoke as their home base.
Key factors are obvious. Quality of life. Affordable housing. Close proximity to transportation that allow the workers to get to the Washington, D.C. and northern Virginia areas.
What's missing from the story? There's no reference to the quality or providers of broadband. Residential Roanoke is is served mostly by Cox with a bit of the city covered by Xfinity. There's also DSL, not fiber, from Verizon and fixed wireless from All Points Broadband. Wireless carrier coverage, and how people in the area make use of both also wasn't mentioned.
Telecommuting workers need to be able to do more than just log on remotely and be working. The quality of broadband, and wireless, directly impacts how well you can take part in conference calls, be visible in video conferences or video calls. Nothing is worse than starting a call on your cell phone and having the call degrade as your cell signal dissipates due to the "totem pole" effect of mobile communications. Outside of "messaging platforms" none were really highlighted, not even the type of technology used.
I also didn't get a sense of what type of "remote workers" the interview subjects were, or what the actually do. Terms like "consultants" and "software engineers" are bit vague. For example, I can easily be considered a "consultant" but I'm also a virtual CMO. Some consultants and engineers do nothing but coding and writing, but what about supporting the customer, internal or external. How much real time communication is there? How do they do that? Is that work done the one day everyone goes into the office?
Overall the story paints a good picture on why someone would want to live in Roanoke, but before you can decide it's the right place to work from, a richer and more complete picture of the infrastructure is needed to help make a highly informed decision.
.