In the 1990s, the near future looked like a place where distance would no longer matter.
In an increasingly online economy, location would matter less than connection. The internet appeared destined to make working from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, much the same as tackling a job from Pittsburg, Kansas.
Yet three decades later, location matters as much as ever.
Cities grew denser. Remote towns leaked talent. The growth of Silicon Valley and other high-tech hubs only added to the divide between city and country.
Now, some Kansas communities again see remote work as a way to rejuvenation. Here are six hurdles to bringing online jobs to rural Kansas and ways they might be overcome.
Internet Speed
When it comes to remote work, connectivity is everything.
Sending emails is possible if painful on a dial-up connection. But todays remote work requires high speed. Video conferences. Screen sharing. Gigabyte-sized project files.
And then theres the future. Augmented reality. Virtual reality. Holograms. Whatever the next technology trend, it will almost certainly consume bandwidth with increasing greed.
Some of them, we just dont know what that’s going to be, said Brian Whitacre, an Oklahoma State University professor studying rural development. But were just seeing this push for more data. More broadband.
Some Kansas cities such as Pittsburg have access to fiber optic cable the current gold standard for high-speed internet. A 200-plus-megabits-per-second connection can better prepare a city for the future of remote work.
But much of Kansas lacks access to the basic broadband needed for todays workplace applications. Remote work just wont come to places with slow internet.
Slow Acceptance of
