About 2 percent of U.S. workers - the self-employed and unpaid volunteers excluded - consider home their primary workplace, the Telework Research Network says. It estimates that 20 million to 30 million people work from home at least one day a week.
That's hardly everyone, though it is more than the Bureau of Labor Statistics' 2001 figure of 19.5 million.
Two additional factors have had a huge effect on the number of home offices: the flagging economy and an overall demand for affordability that has resulted from it.
Members of the home builders' group were surveyed at the end of 2010 about what new homes might look like in 2015, Melman said.
The consensus: Homes will be smaller, and "people will be looking for real value, with the walk-in closet and the laundry room at the very top of the list of features." Most future home buyers (read: younger buyers) will use the portability of electronic devices to "make the most of less square footage."
That's a far cry from the home-office-as-emerging-trend of the 1990s, when telecommuting depended on having a work space that could accommodate, in addition to desk and chair, a telephone, a desktop computer, a modem, a printer, a file cabinet, and storage for floppy disks (remember those?).
When the need for data speed overwhelmed standard wiring, Category 5, an advanced system providing Internet access at speeds 200 times faster, required owners of older homes to rip open walls to upgrade their service. Newly built homes had the less expensive advantage, until wireless technology leveled the playing field.
Today, for about $60, a single-band wireless router allows you to create a building-wide network of computers, printers, and other devices linked to a single Internet source - a cable modem.
